I have a 2021 Outback (my 3rd
I have a 2021 Outback (my 3rd Suburu) and a theory about this. I think Suburu has gone too far with its driver-assist technologies. Especially if you drive in a city, you are constantly having to do things that make the car beep angrily at you, or actually try to drive for you when you do not want or need any help. Parallel parking illicits constant angry beeps and tones bc you are "about to hit" the car behind you when you are well aware of this fact and movibg at less than half a mile per hour. Every time you have to go around a car parked in the middle of a lane, the lane departure goes nuts. If you shift your head position, sometimes the creepy inside -driver facing- camera decides you're not looking at the road and starts yelling at you and flashing sanctimonious messages like "stay alert!" Occasionally the "collision avoidance" system jams on the brakes when you have no need of assistance and then acts like it was a hero with some self-satisfied message like "accident avoided!"
All of this may indeed help Subaru's safety data, bc it is true that there are a lot of distracted drivers on the road today. But...if youre not one of them, if you actually keep your cellphone off and pride yourself on paying attention to what youre doing while driving, then all these implicit and explicit messages from the car telling you that it dissaproves of your driving actually start to piss you off.
For better or worse, people will always anthropormorohize their cars -and the person these cars conjur in your mind's-eye is a complete know-it-all jackass of a backseat driver. On the highway, all the robot-car features may be helpful. But for city driving, I actually block all the cameras. With them blocked I love the car -with them doing what they are designed to, I want to take a baseball bat to it.
I can't believe I'm the only person peeved by these systems. Its too much. when cars are ready to actually drive for me, i may happily let them...but until then, Id like my cars to just quietly do as theyre told. I know these systems may save lives, so perhaps its worth it -but I think in the process Suburu is severing the warm feelings between car and driver it has traditionally fostered.