[kamray23]

Sensors form a big issue, though. The newer Teslas especially are excellent at ruining safety sensors for the rest of the industry. Now instead of turning your head left to look left and see your blind spot out of what should be a far enough back window to see your blind spot, you can crouch over to press buttons and then look at the small circle on the big screen which shows your blind spot. Fine otherwise but it incentivises not even looking out of your left window as you begin turning, and takes your sight off the road in general, even if for just a look, and even when automatically activated by the blinker. It's a profoundly unsafe safety system because it acts to take your sight away from where it should go, even if it means you don't have to quickly turn your head, and it allows lazier and less safe vehicle design as you no longer have to make sure the driver has possible sightlines to blind spots.

Worse perhaps are all types of proximity sensors, because you can only trust them when they go off, and even then not always. Most cars get dirt on them, snow on them, rain on them and that tends to mess with proximity sensing enough to either disable the sensors or cause them to go off randomly. I don't think anyone has ever yet trusted the blind spot sensors on their mirrors to do a lane change, only aborted one because of them. Such non-camera sensors would fix almost nothing because at best they would sometimes cause people to reconsider swerving into a motorcyclist, and even then they usually go off way too late to prevent misfires while driving normally.

These are great features when they work but overengineering around fundamental design problems seems to me to only put people too much at ease in their cars and make bad driver behaviour worse, because why spin your head around to check when you can just not do that and stare at the little screen or trust your array of easily fooled sensors to do safety in your place. I think solutions like finding alternative pillar configurations, creating long or short enough front side windows for you to see back, harsher driver's license testing with longer required study periods and in cases where you can't do anything else such as some pickups just doing what semis do and having several well-aligned mirrors instead of one set of nice-looking ones would be a lot safer in the end.

As well as getting people who can't drive for shit off the road. That's sort of included in driver's license requirements but there's surely some other methods for it that I have not mentioned.