Probably preaching to the converted here, but I just wondered what people thought of some of the warning signals that modern cars tend to feature. Useful, or an aid to complacency?
I took the B Max on a longer drive this week: a round trip of 400-odd miles to Scarborough from North Wales via Hull and back. The car has enough power to spare for most situations, though the skin on the rice pudding remains intact. Only one glitch on the way, and that was when a cheery little jingle sounded in the car, and an orange warning sign popped up on the display along with a message about low tyre pressures. I pulled off the M62 at a junction, stopped the car when it was safe to do so, checked tyre pressures (bearing in mind we'd be travelling for a couple of hours by then and pressure would be slightly raised) but all was well. With further investigation I worked out how to reset the deflation sensor to accept the current pressures. So, apparently a false alarm.
However, the event threw me because the car is still unfamiliar. and all the way to Hull and onwards I was expecting further odd noises, though thankfully there were none.
A more general point occured to me afterwards, and that's the question as to whether these sensors and warning signals encourage complacency and lack of maintenance because we tend to become over reliant on them to tell us when things are awry, rather than doing the checks ourselves before we set off.
Anyone have any thoughts on that?
For things like headlights, then I think it would be reasonably obvious to the driver if they weren't (even one) working, with (turn) indicators and rear fog lamps, then yes, I think a warning light to indicate failure would be appropriate, as a failure during driving would not be obvious until they either lined up with a reflective surface or had an accident/near miss as a result of another vehicle not knowing that they were going to turn (not a good situation). Checking lights before we set of is law/part of the highway code if I recall.
As regards the TPWS, they often get confused when clogged up with mud and water - it was reported as a fault (once) on the latest Mazda3 on HJ - not sure whether this was something just for Mazdas (didn't see any other reports), part (may be shared across other makes, but again, haven't see any yet) or just bad luck if the car owner was going through some really wet and muddy roads. Hopefully a quick clean and reset (where and how?) of the sensor would do the trick, though I'm sure it would be quite irritating if you couldn't easily stop or it kept going off a lot during a trip.
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