Getting advanced driver safety systems right

You might be the driver behind the wheel, but in some new cars it can feel like technology wants you to take a back seat.

It may ping when you approach a speed limit, offer a not-so-gentle correction when you drift into another lane, flash when cars cross into your blind spot or blip if the shopping in the passenger seat feels like a human without their seatbelt on.

Although each alert is designed to make the drive safer, together they can be overwhelming, particularly if you don’t understand them.

Known as advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS, these technologies have gradually been introduced to vehicles for more than 50 years, starting with the first anti-lock braking system (ABS) in 1966.

ABS became mandatory in Australian cars in 2003, and electronic stability control became standard about a decade later, with both playing a significant role in saving lives on the road.

But today the range of in-built safety systems has exploded.

Keeping up with the tech

Austroads has created ADAS Assist, Australia’s first app and online resource to help drivers understand how ADAS is changing cars.

It lists more than 30 common systems, from blind spot warnings and fatigue alerts to cameras that check you won’t reverse into a pole, and brake support to slow you down when descending a steep hill.

And while the website is designed to educate drivers about how to use ADAS properly, it is also a response to confused or frustrated drivers simply turning the systems off.

As many as one in five drivers reportedly switches off ADAS routinely in their vehicles.

So what are the ADAS features that get the worst rap?

Automatic emergency braking (AEB) is one of the systems that attracts the most concern, with many drivers caught out the first time their car throws on the brakes, anticipating the risk of a crash.

The technology has been required in all new cars sold in Australia from March 2025 and continues to improve and become more sensitive.

All vehicles sold after August this year are required to be fitted with a version of AEB that can reduce the risk of hitting pedestrians or cyclists as well as other cars.

AEB works by using radar and LiDAR sensors and/or cameras positioned low on the front and back of vehicles and at the top of the windscreen behind the rear-view mirror.

These sense if the vehicle is approaching traffic that has slowed (or a stationary object) and applies the brakes if the driver doesn’t appear to respond.

According to Austroads, vehicles with AEB are half as likely to be involved in a front-to-rear collision.

The technology is also believed to avoid or reduce severity of trauma in light vehicle crashes by 70 per cent.

Yet car forums are full of drivers who share tips on how to turn off the AEB in their cars, believing it hinders their driving, rather than helps it.

Lane departure warning is another technology that can divide drivers.

Designed to reduce head-on, single-vehicle and side-swipe crashes, Austroads says this system could prevent as much as 27 per cent of fatal head-on crashes by alerting the driver with sounds or buzzing in the steering wheel if they drift out of their lane without warning. Head-on collisions are responsible for around 200 deaths per year, according to Austroads data.

A similar system, Lane Keep Assist, can apply steering correction to help guide the vehicle back within its lane.

By law, lane-keeping technologies have been required in all new models since 2024 and any light vehicle sold since March this year.

But some drivers complain the tools can be poorly tuned and too aggressive in the ways they seek to correct the vehicle’s positioning on the road.

Fine tuning ADAS features

As Australia’s independent vehicle safety rating body, ANCAP has been watching the introduction of new technologies closely, and this year has updated its safety testing protocols to focus greater attention on whether tools are designed appropriately and can be well-adopted by drivers.

ANCAP uses four pillars of assessment when considering vehicle safety: safe driving technologies and features that aid the driver, crash avoidance technologies, crash protection features, and post-crash support, such as whether the car can alert and assist with an emergency response.

It has been incorporating ADAS in its ratings since 2018 but has now refined its testing to consider just how effective and ‘robust’ these systems can be.

“These systems have been around for a while now. Some have worked really well. Some haven't worked as well, and we’re aware that a lot of drivers haven't liked the experience with certain features,” says ANCAP CEO Carla Hoorweg.

“There's a huge shift in the protocols this year to focus on how well those systems are performing and how usable they are.

“What's the driver or human interface like? Is it performing and behaving the way that you would expect as a driver? Is it actually assisting you, rather than being a hindrance?”

ANCAP doesn’t make or enforce vehicle design rules but awards points to vehicles (and deducts them) to create its safety star rating. For ADAS, it looks at a range of factors, including the impact of safety features on drivers, marking down those where the feedback system of beeps and alerts is too intrusive.

For things like lane support, ANCAP will look at how quickly the car’s steering reacts when lane support kicks in, how much steering input the driver needs to use to override the vehicle if its help is not required, and how aggressive or gently the car adjusts in the lane when the system is activated.

“We can set protocols for the manufacturers and say if the torque exceeds this, or if the angle exceeds that, you're going to lose points,” Hoorweg says.

“Now that we've restructured the way the scoring works for 2026, we've got a lot of levers to pull. If we don't see the responses that we want in terms of performance, then we change the point scoring and the weightings of areas so that it becomes very hard for manufacturers to do well if they're not delivering the kind of performance that customers want to see.”

Another way ANCAP is advocating for drivers is through the visibility of critical systems. Just because something can be entirely electronic, Hoorweg says, that doesn’t always make it safer.

ANCAP is asking manufacturers to bring back physical buttons so that in-car features can be physically manipulated rather than hidden in nested menus on a screen.

ANCAP is also asking that cars with electric door handles provide the ability, in the event of a crash, for doors to be opened from inside and for flush external door handles to automatically revert to the extended position.

While these changes will help future car development, they don’t immediately solve the problem of drivers unhappy with their car’s beeps and buzzes.

More education is needed

Senior Research Fellow Amanda Stephens was part of a project at the Monash University Accident Research Centre that reviewed a host of studies into the use of ADAS and tested perceptions of the technology with focus groups.

The report, published in April 2026, was designed to provide baseline evidence for the use or misuse of ADAS by Australian drivers.

It found around a quarter of drivers distrusted forward collision warning technology and lane departure warnings, and around half of drivers reported ADAS technologies had responded with a false alarm on the road.

Yet a significant proportion of drivers also reported the technologies had helped save them from a crash, with 57 per cent reporting forward collision systems had averted a crash and 67 per cent believing blind spot warnings had avoided a collision.

Stephens says the focus groups were looking at an earlier generation of ADAS, which continues to improve, but there was a strong desire by drivers to better understand the systems.

“One thing that came up was there's so much information around the different systems, and that has led to a lot of the car salespeople saying, ‘Well, I can't tell them everything, because that's going to overwhelm them’,” she says.

Many drivers complained the sales process wasn’t informative enough about safety features, and they felt they were left to figure it out as they went along.

“Some people don't know what they need to know until something beeps or something goes off,” she says.

“Even if they get information at the point of sale, it's probably not going to sit with them until they need to know it — and in test drive situations, you're hoping that these things aren't going off.

“Suddenly it’s going off and it's beeping, and that's when we had people say they were having their passenger consult a manual to try to figure it out.”

The report’s findings match those of RAC, which has found 83 per cent of members want more education and training for drivers on how to use vehicle safety features.

ANCAP’s Carla Hoorweg says the shift by many manufacturers to sell vehicles online rather than through traditional dealerships might be part of the challenge.

“Some people are now purchasing vehicles without having test driven them, because the manufacturer is doing online sales, or there might be just a small showroom, and you have to book in to get a test drive,” she says.

“You’re spending a lot of money on a vehicle, so you want to get in, test drive it, and you want the dealership to show you what all the features are: how to turn them all on and let them show you what the technology can do.”

At the end of the day, she says, ADAS can make an enormous difference in road safety, so adoption is critical.

“We want these systems to be used. They are incredibly effective when people understand how they work, and manufacturers have put a lot of time and effort into developing these systems,” she says.

“If these technologies are done well, they are incredibly supportive and take a lot of the cognitive load out of the driving task, especially if you're doing long drives.

“It should make everything safer and easier, and that's what we want to see.”