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28 August, 2026
EN
Written by
Victor Brandt
Ever since the introduction of the seat belt, advanced automotive safety systems have been met by the same chain of reactions from users: “why is this needed?”, “this is annoying!”, or “it’s limiting my freedom!”
Even when change is statistically beneficial for all, there is a natural reluctance to accept it — especially when it asks you to change your relationship with your vehicle. To the individual, it can feel unnecessary. This is not irrational. It is human.
The risk is that regulations and standards, despite having the right intentions, inadvertently reinforce that reluctance. By mandating solutions that prioritize visible compliance over driver experience — think persistent audible warnings, intrusive alerts, and systems that feel like they are working against the driver rather than with them — regulation can end up undermining the very safety outcomes it seeks to achieve.
This brings us to what we believe is the most important principle in Driver Monitoring System (DMS) design: the most effective system is one that is not deactivated.
A system that drivers find tolerable, unobtrusive, or even valuable will remain on. A system that feels punishing will be switched off at the first opportunity, or lobbied out of existence entirely. Effectiveness is therefore not just a technical metric. It is a user acceptance metric.
This is precisely the tension embedded in today’s regulatory landscape. The EU’s General Safety Regulation (GSR) establishes an important and necessary mandate for Driver Monitoring Systems. But it deliberately sets a relatively low bar, and the details of where that bar sits matter considerably.
The baseline DDAW (Driver Drowsiness and Attention Warning) requirement, phased in from 2022, permits indirect behavioral signals — like steering patterns and lane deviations — as the basis for detection, though direct driver-facing observation remains the more capable and preferable approach.
The ADDW (Advanced Driver Distraction Warning) standard, requiring direct gaze and attention monitoring, came into force for new vehicle types in 2024 and extends to all new registrations by July 2026. But even here, the regulation is narrow in scope: warnings are essentially only required when the driver is looking down into the cabin interior, where there is clearly no driving-relevant information, and only for what the regulation classifies as “continuous distraction”. In other words, the focus is on sustained inattention rather than the broader and more complex reality of driver distraction.
This is by design, and arguably by wisdom. A regulation that sets a performance floor without dictating exactly how manufacturers must meet it leaves room for smarter, more accepted solutions to emerge. The danger is when manufacturers treat the floor as the ceiling, delivering the minimum compliant warning behavior without asking whether that behavior actually keeps drivers safer, or simply trains them to dismiss alerts.
There is also a deeper, less obvious risk. When regulatory compliance becomes the primary design target, test protocols begin to shape not just how systems are evaluated, but how they are built. A system tuned to pass a defined test scenario may perform very differently — and far less convincingly — in the hands of a real driver on a real road.
Neither ADDW nor DDAW under the GSR contains any requirement relating to false warning rates, meaning a system can be fully compliant while still issuing enough spurious alerts to erode driver trust. The general public has no easy way to distinguish between a system built to pass a regulatory test and a system that is genuinely good. If drivers’ first impressions of DMS are shaped by compliant but poorly designed systems, the reputational damage to the technology as a whole can be lasting — and difficult to recover from.
This is where Euro NCAP’s evolving approach stands apart. Its updated DMS protocols go beyond specific test case detection performance and explicitly considers the false warning dimension. It’s recognizing that a system which alerts too readily is not just annoying, it can also undermine safety by weakening driver trust. The message is clear: a Euro NCAP star rating should reflect how a system actually behaves in the hands of real drivers, not just whether it technically triggers under test conditions.
Focusing system design on user acceptance and understanding while maintaining the safety benefits that are intended by the regulators is the way forward. Daring to see past passing homologation tests as the sole purpose of the technology will not only reward the industry and all road users with less accidents, but it will play a large role in dictating whether a certain vehicle is actually desirable.
The seat belt offers a useful lesson in how safety technologies earn acceptance. Introduced by Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin in Sweden in 1959 and deliberately made available to the entire industry as a public safety contribution, it took the better part of three decades for the three-point seat belt to become a legal requirement across most of the world. It took several more decades before wearing it became simply what people do.
Mandates helped, and so did incremental design improvements. But what ultimately normalized seat belt usage was a genuine shift in public understanding of the risk: campaigns, data, and generational exposure that made the safety case viscerally real. Today, usage rates across Europe and the US consistently exceed 90%. The technology didn’t change behavior on its own. Understanding did.
Driver Monitoring Systems are at a similar inflection point, and with the right approach the timeline of acceptation can be greatly reduced. The technology is mature enough to be genuinely helpful. The regulatory environment is moving — broadly — in the right direction. What must follow is a design philosophy, reinforced by regulation, that treats driver acceptance not as a nice-to-have, but as a core safety requirement.
Because a system that stays on saves lives. One that gets turned off does not.
Victor Brandt is a Technical Product Owner at Smart Eye, working with Driver Monitoring Systems and automotive interior sensing. His work includes interpreting and applying DMS requirements from frameworks such as the EU’s General Safety Regulation and Euro NCAP, with a focus on how they translate into real-world system design and behavior.
