Just got back from a couple of weeks in the Canary Isles. We hired a car for the duration, nothing fancy, the smallest, cheapest one the hire company had, a little Hyundai jobby. Anyway, as we leave the airport, I'm on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong side of the car, after a very early start, so I'm a tad stressed. As we pull onto the slip road onto the dual carriageway, the (digital) dash lights up like Blackpool front, and a succession of different bings/bongs and beeps serenades my fevered ears. I genuinely panicked, thinking I'd either left a door open/handbrake on/seatbelt off etc. Bear in mind that the digital dash is currently set to Spanish, so I'm clueless. It turns out that this thing has road sign recognition, so every time it passes a speed sign it bongs to tell you that the limit has changed, it then beeps to tell me that I'm exceeding the limit. Now this didn't just pi55 me off, it also annoyed Mrs Spuds, as that's normally her job. It also boings to tell me to change gear. . There was no obvious way to turn this sh1t off, It really was stressful and distracting, I found it absolutely no help whatsoever. Bearing in mind I was in a semi urban environment, so the speed limits were constantly changing, so this thing is incessant. After a while, it became background noise and I tuned it out, more or less negating the point of it's existence.
It gets better; as we drove over the mountains towards our digs, there are some really nice long gentle curves between the hills with little traffic and great visibility. I've driven it many times and enjoy the drive. As we passed between a couple of the hills on a slow curve, the car started pulling to one side, it felt just like a flat tyre. I pulled across to the side and it cleared up and seemed ok, so we continued. A minute or two later, exactly the same thing, I'm trying to turn to follow a curve in the road and straighten it out (the road is empty) and I'm fighting the steering. I pulled over and checked the tyres, no apparent flat. It turns out that this thing has lane guidance, and if it detects that you're crossing the white line, it attempts to correct you FFS! So as I'm having a nice drive on long empty roads, and straightening out the odd bend, the car has other ideas.
I eventually found out how to put the dash into English, but there was no obvious way to switch off the various speed warning bongs & boings. The lane guidance thingy could be disabled temporarily, but defaulted back to "on" each time you started the car, as with "Auto stop/start". Apparently, all these things are now standard on new cars, I'm not convinced that they actually bring anything to the party.
It gets better; as we drove over the mountains towards our digs, there are some really nice long gentle curves between the hills with little traffic and great visibility. I've driven it many times and enjoy the drive. As we passed between a couple of the hills on a slow curve, the car started pulling to one side, it felt just like a flat tyre. I pulled across to the side and it cleared up and seemed ok, so we continued. A minute or two later, exactly the same thing, I'm trying to turn to follow a curve in the road and straighten it out (the road is empty) and I'm fighting the steering. I pulled over and checked the tyres, no apparent flat. It turns out that this thing has lane guidance, and if it detects that you're crossing the white line, it attempts to correct you FFS! So as I'm having a nice drive on long empty roads, and straightening out the odd bend, the car has other ideas.
I eventually found out how to put the dash into English, but there was no obvious way to switch off the various speed warning bongs & boings. The lane guidance thingy could be disabled temporarily, but defaulted back to "on" each time you started the car, as with "Auto stop/start". Apparently, all these things are now standard on new cars, I'm not convinced that they actually bring anything to the party.
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