How does safety technology usage affect driver safety behavior?

You forgot choice #3. Distracting PITA

 

These are all for my personal driving

Lane departure: annoying and doesn’t change anything. Gets set off by random reflections and tar snakes more than anything else. I don’t hate it though, but a little annoying in the right conditions

Collision monitoring: Doesn’t change anything. The only thing that sets it off is people taking exit ramps and the truck not realizing they’re off the road in time if I have cruise on

Blind spot monitoring: it’s alright. I don’t know if it makes me safer or not, but it’s the most consistently accurate of the safety systems.

Adaptive cruise and distance monitoring: absolutely the most infuriating things. I don’t need my truck slamming the Jake brake because someone 6 seconds ahead was reaching for a water bottle in the floorboard and slowed down for a couple seconds. Distance monitoring isn’t the worst, but it doesn’t do any good. All it does is make my blood pressure skyrocket whenever Tammy in her Dodge Caravan decides she wants to get in between me and the truck I’m going the same speed as and it starts incessantly beeping because my following distance went from 6 seconds to 5.5

 

Either they are ignored completely or relied upon way too much.

 

They're good for one thing - increasing blood pressure.

 

I've noticed a steady decline in skill from every type of road user the last 10-15 years. I firmly believe all these safety systems are the cause. No need to develope driving skills if the vehicle thinks for you.

 

Drivers used to have more input and be more involved consistently when everything was manual. It keeps the driver fully engaged. The automatic came along, and it’s actually created a distraction. Because the driver is not required to be as engaged at all times. Now you start adding these so-called safety gadgets. To me they’re all just distractions. I stopped using the cruise control years ago when I was cruising down the freeway without any entity in sight. And for whatever reason maybe a ghost, I don’t know, Perhaps an alien spacecraft that I couldn’t see that the computer could? My truck decided to lock its brakes up in the middle of the freeway. There was absolutely nothing there. And I thought to myself never again. Things like the lane departure thing or warning system goes off all the time for various reasons. I don’t even think I hear it anymore. I just totally tuned it out. Blindspot monitoring, we should all know how to check our blind spots and we should do it every time, but I guess that’s probably the only system that I might agree with.

 

A number of these “safety” systems are dangerous.
The collision avoidance system and the automated brakes are probably the most dangerous of the systems. The others are more of an annoying thing than anything else.

 

I doubt many drivers could even comprehend how to shift a Spicer 6x4 today; knowing when to stay in your 'range' and just shift the auxiliary, or when to change range, and which gear in Aux to be in when doing so. Thing like "I'm in 5/3 right now, but can I climb that next hill in 5/1, or do I need to go to 4/4 or maybe 4/3? Wait for it to bog down enough and just shift the range int 4, leaving Aux in 3?"