The first thing I did the other day after I sat down in the all-new (just updated for 2026) Mazda CX-5 that was dropped off for me to test drive and write about was disable about a dozen different “assistance technologies” embedded in this vehicle. Including – and this one took me awhile to find the “off” button (which is a actually a virtual button – a touchscreen “button” – buried in the huge LCD touchscreen’s array of menus) – for the speed limit “assistance” that caused an extremely irritating and so distracting beep! to erupt from within the dash somewhere every time I drove even 1 MPH faster than whatever the posted speed limit was.
Which of course the car knew. Just as it knew I was “speeding.” Every. Single. Time.
If I had not found the “off” tab/icon I would have stopped driving the car. It was that irritating. It is hard for me to believe there is anyone who would not find it so. In the ebb and flow of traffic, it is almost impossible to not drive below the speed limit and when you resume your speed, if you “speed” even 1 MPH over whatever the limit is – which we all do – you get that beep! The urge to put my fist through the screen was difficult to tamp down. Imagine the most annoying mother-in-law you can imagine and now imagine her being inside the dashboard of your car.
What are they thinking?
Put another way, do they think most people like – and want this stuff? I’ve yet to have a single reader or call-in guest to the many radio shows and podcasts I do tell me they love this stuff. Quite the opposite. Everyone I talk to tells me they loathe it and in many cases, the loathing is such that they have told me they will not buy a new vehicle equipped with this “technology.” THat they’d rather drive their old car – or walk, even.
Perfectly understandable. It’s not just that it’s controlling. It is insulting. The underlying assumption being that none of us are competent to drive without “assistance.” That we are basically morons. In less politically correct times, we are the retards wearing helmets on the short bus to the special education center.
That, at any rate, is how the car companies apparently look upon us.
It is also something deeper – and worse than just insulting. If it is not obvious to you by now, the end goal of all of this “assisting” is to assist you into being a passenger in a transportation appliance. Full automation – which is a tautology for full control – is what they ultimately intend and we won’t be able to opt out of it, just as we are currently not allowed to opt out of all the rest of it.
Can you buy a new car without seat belts? Is it a legal requirement that you wear them? It seems benign – or so it has been presented. It is not benign. Mandatory seat belts were the Rubicon that was crossed about 60 years ago; on the other side of that river is everything else, from six or more air bags to “drowsy/distracted driver” eye movement monitoring and a roster of “assisting” that presumes you are too inept to keep your car in its travel lane, to notice that traffic ahead is slowing or stopped, that the car ahead of you waiting for the light to go green has begun to move forward, that you are unable to back up the car without running over a kid, that you are too dim to remember that you left your kid in the car, to inept to parallel park the car, that you can’t make a left turn against traffic on your own and that you can’t even open the door to get out of the car “safely” on your own.
The above constitutes a partial enumeration of the “assistance” systems that are unavoidably standard in the brand-new Mazda CX-5 as well as pretty much every other make/model new vehicle.
It’s a sad signpost along the road, though, to find out that Mazda – which up to now has been pretty good about not going all-in on this stuff – is going all in. It took me several minutes of scrolling through menus and tapping the various virtual buttons to shut off most of the “assistance.” I use italics to make a point about not being turn off all of the “assistance.” Several of these “assistance” systems can only be turned down. It is something like Inner Party member O’Brien – in Orwell’s 1984 – being allowed to briefly turn down the TeleScreen via which Big Brother watches. How much longer before we’re not even allowed briefly?
Probably not much longer.
All of this has been slouching toward Bethlehem – to crib a line from Joan Didion – for all of my lifetime, since the 1960s. It was a slow-motion slouching for most of the ’70s and ’80s and even into the ’90s. Seemingly minor annoyances that gradually accrued until – all of a sudden – they are no longer minor annoyances but constant interferences via scolding electronics, no longer avoidable and soon (very soon) to be fully on, all the time.
There isn’t much we can do about this other than to do what many of my readers have told me they’re not going to do – which is to buy anything new that has this “assistance” stuff they didn’t ask for, don’t need and for that reason don’t want to be pestered by.
Maybe that will accomplish something. If enough of us say enough.
. . .
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