When we needed a new family car, I insisted on the Kia Sportage. My friend Charlotte leant me her Which? website password, I part-exchanged my erratic Volvo XC40 and a lovely Kia Sportage duly arrived. Of course, I immediately whizzed off to one of my favourite places in the world: Brent Cross Shopping Centre. I fantasised about all the things from John Lewis that I was going to toss into the Kia’s spacious boot.
But my daydreams were interrupted by an unexpected cacophony of noises from the car. Bleep… bleep… bleep! Ping! Plink! Plink-plink! Wonnngggg! It was even worse than my old erratic Volvo, which was constantly shrieking at me to mind that car, when there was no car, and occasionally wrenching the steering wheel from my hand.
The Kia Sportage is worse. It’s as if it has been designed by an extremely nervous aunt who had a small prang in 1992 thereby setting her nerves off. What this car-designing aunt would most like is for no one to ever get in a car again. But if they must, it would be best if the car whistled and beeped and went ‘Plink’ every three seconds. ‘Plink!’ said the Kia. ‘Plink! Plink!’
Was it my seatbelt? Was the hatch of the spacious boot open? No, the Kia wanted me to notice a ‘No Entry’ sign. But I could see for myself that there was a ‘No Entry’ sign, because I have eyes!
Worse, there are cameras everywhere on the car. There are cameras on the sides, which neurotically display footage on the dashboard whenever you make a left or right turn. Again, this is unnecessary. I have wing and rear-view mirrors, as well as the eyes, which I have already mentioned.
I drove through the width-restriction at the top of my road and discovered another camera, showing a birds-eye view of my car going through the bollards, which was dizzying and sick-making. Such alarmism is also borderline insulting: I once took my dearly departed 2002 Ford Fiesta Zetec through this restriction at 20mph without so much as clipping the wing mirror and didn’t need a nauseating, top-down camera for that.
What’s more, the Kia has the same alarmist lane-correcting feature as the Volvo, which vibrates the steering wheel and then snatches it out of your hand to adjust your course. Doesn’t this, surely, make drivers less safe? I have been driving for 17 years and I’m pretty sure the trick is simply concentration. If you resist doing your make-up or eating a full English breakfast while at the wheel, you’ll be fine.
So why invent a car that seeks to distract the driver with bleeps and dings? To inform them of such total irrelevances as that No Entry sign over there, to the left – no, not there, there, just by that hedge. The alerts sent me searching the dashboard, thinking, ‘What? What is it?!’ when I would surely have been better off looking at the road.
The Kia has the same alarmist lane-correcting feature as the Volvo, which vibrates the steering wheel and then snatches it out of your hand to adjust your course
My old Ford Fiesta had no alerts or safety features, and I had the same number of accidents in that car as I have had in all the other increasingly safety-featured cars I’ve owned, which is zero. My husband’s accident rate, on the other hand, has declined over the years, from approximately one a week to almost never. But that is because he used to be an impulsive young man and now he is old. It’s nothing to do with the car.
Needless to say, mad safetyism is Europe’s fault. In January this magazine brought to our attention the existence of the European NCAP, the New Car Assessment Programme, which road tests new cars for safety features and awards them a star rating based on their findings.
But mission creep and other unhealthy human behaviour have caused car manufacturers to add totally unnecessary gimmicks to all cars, in order to get a coveted 5-star safety rating from the NCAP. It has the scent of a racket about it but also brute illogic. In January this year, Richard Schram technical director at NCAP explained ‘We want to make sure that the safety systems are not overly-sensitive to small changes in the environment.’ Clearly, he hasn’t sat in a Kia Sportage.
So what’s the answer? I sat in the Kia in the Brent Cross carpark until I worked out that there is a button on the steering wheel that will turn most of the dinging off, which must be pressed every time you start a journey. The vertigo-inducing camerawork must simply be ignored unless I find the button for that, too.
And, I suppose, we must cross our fingers that one day in the future someone, somewhere will grasp the NCAP by the elbow and stop this nonsense. If you can’t spot a No Entry sign for yourself, you really shouldn’t be driving a car at all.
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