EU requires all new cars to have cameras facing the driver’s face to monitor their behaviour

[NutellaEllaElla]

https://www.carscoops.com/2026/07/eu-driver-monitoring-mandate/

Is anyone else unhappy about this? I hate how technology is invading my life. In my car it gets speed limits wrong all the time, it fights me trying to change lanes without indicating (and I don’t need to, again the car doesn’t know), there’s just so much it gets wrong and the tech itself is a distraction. I’m all for options, but I want to be able to turn it off as well please. Is there no end? Can we resist??

Same! Well our Kia is a 25 plate but it fucking bings bongs and beeps constantly about all sorts of non existent issues!! 😡 And yes you can’t turn any of it off permanently. And don’t get me started on the imaginary things it thinks I’m going to crash into - when there is literally nothing there! It’s such a shame because our previous Kia (a 2022 plate) did none of this shit.

My car already does this, but ultimately the fault is with the car design and these bloody awful touch screens. In my older car, I can adjust the heat, fans and radio by touch alone. New car is navigating a bloody iPad, which I genuinely do not understand how it is legal. So ruddy complicated and so many steps to do the basic functions of keeping the ambience of the car decent, safe and limited of distractions.

It also goes nuts at me if I sing along to music, as it thinks I am yawning...

It's not as easy as that, though. We've never owned a car that's under 8 years old - we currently have cars that are 15 and 25 years old... but at one point, every single one of those cars was brand new and had to comply with the new vehicle regulations of the time.

Buy a new car now or buy a 15yo car in 2041... you'll still have the same car with the same features.

I always always indicate even though it is 3.00 am and I am the only person on the road (or I think I am). Even those who are "observant enough" can get it wrong.

Banning cars would be a fail-safe way of doing this. Or if that's too extreme, a compulsory private police officer to travel with you for all journeys. Or maybe just a live camera link from every car to a central traffic-monitoring police force.

Where do you draw the line?

I rented a hire car a couple of years ago (brand new, I was the first to drive it), a hybrid MG SUV. God it was awful. I got into a horrible tailback on the M25 leaving the airport and suddenly after about 2 hours in the car, a beeping started with a flashing warning light. This of course made me think something was wrong with the car, there was no where to pull over or off, I was in crawling motorway traffic. The warning beeps got louder and louder.

I eventually managed to reach a service station (so losing my place in the traffic queue), googled and found out it was a picture of a coffee cup as it wanted me to take a break as I had been driving for over 2 hours! I nearly went full John Cleese with a nearby branch!

To be honest, the 'have a coffee' warning when I didn't know what it was turned out to be more distracting and nervewracking than having nothing at all!

No manufacturers build their top model and then disable features rather than differentiate as it streamlines costs. I expect the camera to be installed but not active for the UK market.

Please include pedestrians in this thinking as it's a right pain when you don't know where a car is going

Oh grief / if the sun is low I sit up a lot straighter to get the benefit of the shade and the car goes mental that I am not paying attention anymore

i am trying my best to see

Basically, we're going to end up banned from driving, and computers are going to do it all for us. Which may be a good and/or bad thing. I love driving, but admit I've had my moments.

Humans are going to end up as useless pets, "for the greater good".

Call me a conspiracy nut, but I can't help wondering if this might be all deliberately planned to soften us up to driverless cars, whether we like them or not - with the inevitable banning of human drivers eventually.

If you take away the freedoms and the joys of driving and being independently in charge of the car, it will be that much easier for people to just throw in the towel and leave the whole lot to technology - including the many, many times it fails and is nowhere near as smart as it reckons it is, as detailed on this thread alone.

My old car is annoying enough when it starts pinging and singing and dancing like a wasp at a picnic when the passenger seatbelt isn't being worn by the small bag of shopping sitting there.

Also, surely people don't really believe that, because this is currently only for your own 'benefit' - and not shared with anybody outside the car - it will remain forever thus? People will start off sharing it on TikTok - probably the same people who feel the need to show all of their followers a photo of their Big Mac or a video 'unboxing' of a tube of Pringles - and before long, it will be considered everyday info to share with all and sundry, and not remotely personal or private... except for 'those weirdos who object'.

Aside from anything else, how does the graphic above know the names of the adults in the front seats? And why does it need to include that in the 'info' that it feeds back to them (and to them only) - do they not already know what their own names are? Also its crude guess at whether they are 'happy', 'neutral', 'sad' or whatever? I'm sure they already know if they're actually happy or not already. Is this going to be the Big Brother vehicle equivalent of telling women to "Cheer up, love", because women can't be trusted to drive safely if some random man/camera thinks they aren't masking their feelings enough for their satisfaction?

Or you haven’t seen them. That’s why you always indicate.

Technology is progressing so rapidly, that WE'RE becoming obsolete. The ones who argue that "humans should be humans" are arguing against increased safety. It's going to be hard to convince those who think it's a good thing.

The problem is humans are very much "use it or loose it". So where does that leave us?

Also, I'm not sure if the car manufacturers have noticed(!), but their vehicles often fail and break down or malfunction.

It's annoying enough now when you get a flat tyre or steam pouring from your bonnet and you have to pull over; but how long will it be until people are prevented from travelling - not just 'advised not to' based on wrong assumptions but with the car refusing to move - because the camera glitches and believes that the adult human in the driving seat is actually a dog; or because it's falsely identified the smell of cola on the driver's breath as alcohol; or any of thousands of other things where it is convinced of a 'fact' that is a bare-faced falsehood?

If it's going to start treating all drivers as stupid, silly and naughty little kids anyway, and taking over based on what it reckons to be the case, what's the point in making people wait until they're 17 to drive in the first place?

I was once driving on the M4 at 6am and went past somebody that was driving at 60mph and repeatedly veering out of the left-hand lane. When I looked to see what was going on, I saw a man with a mobile phone balanced on the steering wheel and he was watching a video.

Sorry, I did mean disable it completely. I do know you can switch it off each start but I really couldn’t be arsed.

It's just beyond. They dont give a shit if they kill someone. It's so selfish and unnecessary. Fortunately we were in slow moving traffic and I lost him at some traffic lights, as he was so engrossed he didn't move so they went red again before he got over.

Re the lane thing, you've assumed its not full of middle lane hoggers who actually go slower than lane 1 😂

That happened to me with my old 2003 Audi. It started bonging and flashing (as has been said lots on this thread, it appears that it's fine when the in-built car tech itself distracts the driver) and '2h 00m' flashed up, incidentally overriding important information that normally appeared on that screen.

I was terrified - so obviously not the safest driver I could have been. The severity of it made me worry that it was an engine fault or something, and it was warning me that it was going to break down/blow up/other disaster in 2 hours' time. Yes, it's all in the manual; but who actually reads 500+ pages of 'cover us for every single eventuality' waffle beforehand?

As with you, it was 'just' informing me that I'd been driving for 2 hours and now I must turn off the engine for at least 10 minutes and have a break - even though I was about 12 minutes away from my destination and driving at 3mph through a huge field for a festival.

Having said that, this same 'we know better' lack of common sense was evident 20 years ago when I got a journey planner print out from the AA for a day trip to Orkney. I still remember that it knew that we'd been on a ferry for 1h 40m - and then it calculated that, after 20 minutes of driving after we landed, we'd been travelling for 2 hours, and so we 'must' stop driving and have a rest - presumably not unlike the lovely long one we'd only just had on the ferry (which somebody else, definitely not us, had been driving)!

But doubtless 'available for your use' if you pay them £X a month to 'subscribe' - whether by choice or forced to by a new law further down the line.

All the above is why I will never buy a new car! I prefer to do all the thinking and driving myself, keeps me sharp.

Depending on your age, though, eventually you'll have no choice. Todays' ancient old banger was once a brand new car.

Let's be honest...the cars they are building today are not going to be around for as long. They are computers that are built to fail and conveniently cost an absolute fortune to fix if the parts are even available.

Then if someone in UK doesn’t like the feature, they just cover up the camera or have it disabled until it becomes law in this country.

Except - as noted - we still got EU bottle caps. Plus a whole host of other developments we had no say on.