ADAS stands for Advanced Driver Assistance System which means these features are meant to assist drivers for a safer drive but that has taken a whole new meaning in India where owners of ADAS-equipped cars are often found playing around with those features and being a little too complacent.
Social media is rife with videos posted by owners of different cars doing everything other than concentrating on driving, while their cars are doing pretty decent speeds on highways, with ADAS features activated. There have been videos of cars being driven with no one in the driver’s seat, passengers and the driver playing a game of cards, or drivers just pulling off weird antics with the car on the move.
Well, such content pieces are going utterly viral on social media platforms and the users posting such videos seem to be enjoying this newfound fame but what they don’t understand is that after looking at such videos, others too are getting such ideas and in turn creating more such content on social media.
Keeping social media aside, pulling off such antics on public roads is deadly in literal sense. Our roads are anyway unpredictable when it comes to potholes, jaywalkers, wrong side drivers, lane-cutting drivers and so on. Something could go wrong and in a milli-second, a lot of lives would get ruined. Maybe some ADAS feature would stop working, maybe some person or animal could jump right in front of the car; anything can happen!
But not just this, there are also a lot of people who have become overly dependent on ADAS features, so much so that they rely on the AEB feature (Autonomous Emergency Braking) all the time. It is a known fact that AEB causes the car to brake really hard when something comes in front of it, and relying on this feature too much has different cons like faster wear and tear of brake pads and a higher chance of someone rear-ending you.
ADAS features are designed for a purpose and if you use them properly, they can be very convenient. But that also means that we as drivers still need to give our 100% concentration while driving. Features like blind spot alerts, rear cross-traffic alert, high beam assist, etc. are useful but let’s also not forget our roots. We come from an era where not too long back, left hand side ORVMs and parking sensors were optional features and yet we drove just fine.
