If you’ve rented or owned a modern car, you might’ve seen a warning message featuring a pictogram of a coffee cup appear on the dashboard, along with a message asking you to take a break. Often called a “driver attention alert” or “driver attention warning system,” it’s a bit of well-meaning tech aimed at changing driver behavior. But does it actually do anything? The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crunched the numbers on that last point, and it turns out that coffee-cup warning light might sometimes just be an annoyance.
Late last year, IIHS researchers sifted through eight years of claims data from Mazdas with various advanced driver assistance system packages, separating feature sets into buckets. Unsurprisingly, features like automatic emergency braking and lane departure prevention make a sizeable difference in preventing or reducing the severity of rear-end, offset, and run-off-road collisions. However, the little attention alert function doesn’t seem to be doing much discernible good in this application. As per an IIHS release:
The bundle that added Driver Attention Alert was a notable exception, delivering no greater benefits with the addition of the new feature. It’s possible that the alert came into play too rarely to affect claim rates, as it only activates after about 20 minutes of driving between 41 mph and 86 mph and may not function on roads without clear lane markings.
Mazda’s Driver Attention Alert is one of the more basic driver attention systems, the sort that doesn’t point a camera at the driver. Instead, it uses the lane departure warning system along with driver inputs to estimate how tired a driver is, and if a certain level of input ping-ponging is reached or if a drive in the prescribed speed range lasts longer than two hours, a reminder appears on the gauge cluster to take a break. It sounds like a relatively cheap way of trying something, but now that IIHS has crunched the numbers, the inexpensive way doesn’t seem effective. As the organization wrote, “In fact, it showed reduced benefits across most coverages and an increase in BI [bodily injury] claim frequency, although only the results for collision and PDL [property damage liability] were statistically significant.”
The note of reduced benefits is particularly interesting. Since IIHS structured Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) packages by feature inclusion, other than the addition of Driver Attention Alert, there isn’t an equipment difference compared to the closest comparable package. It’s quite possible the reduced safety benefits of the assistance package with Driver Attention Alert are a matter of noise or sample size, but we are talking about a fairly minor swing here of three percentage points.
Beyond the functional limitations of these primitive driver-attention warning systems, questions still remain around the efficacy of simply asking drivers if they’re getting a bit tired. Humans don’t always take suggestions, especially from inanimate objects. Do you have a person in your life who’s perfectly content to cruise around with a check engine light or a tire pressure monitoring system light on their dashboard? This is much like that.
Of course, such primitive driver-attention warning systems shouldn’t be confused for a driver-monitoring system that points a camera at the driver to look for signs of fatigue, such as eye-closing, blinking, and yawning. These newer systems, often sourced from Seeing Machines, function at all speeds in all environments and should be more effective than simply guesstimating driver tiredness from lane position. Considering we’ve only seen the proliferation of modern driver-facing camera-based monitoring systems in the past seven or eight years or so, I’m looking forward to the analysts crunching the data on potential progress. For now though, that coffee cup warning light on your dashboard might be just as ineffective as you’ve suspected, so long as there isn’t a camera pointed at your face.
Top graphic images: Mazda; Nissan
I prefer to not have a camera pointed at me while I’m sitting in my car. At least not a camera inside the car with me.
Speaking of lights on the dash: my ’89 Volvo 240 has one of those upshift lights. As best I recall, this is the first and only car I’ve owned that had one of those. It seems to want me to upshift to the next gear very quickly, presumably in an effort to improve mileage (which is modest to begin with). Further, I live in a very hilly area, and it would basically be impossible to upshift when it tells me to on the way home, because that light only seems informed by RPM, and not actual forward progress of the vehicle or (more importantly) the angle of the road.
The optional Fuel Economy warning light reference in my 1976 Maverick owner’s manual is another example of useless. It’s an idiot light connected to a vacuum sensor that goes on when you touch the accelerator.
The fuel economy gauge in my gas guzzling MB is almost certainly just a tach with a different label.
Well, my Hyundai Ioniq 5 has a camera pointed at me, and it has exclusively asked me to “consider taking a break” when I was perfectly alert and not fatigued at all on short journeys.
On road trips when I’m actually tired? Not a peep.
Useless system.
Maybe it was analyzing under-eye bags, or how bloodshot your eyes are? I’m kidding of course, but someday these systems will do more than watch where your eyes are pointed and whether they’re open.
You’re listening to Handel or Brahms? The AI is going to keep an extra close watch on you until you switch back to Adam Ant.
This is begging for an integration with the Fiat Espresso machine
I always wanted one of those. 🙂
Change the coffee cup symbol to a cellphone in the red circle with the red slash across it, as it is the primary cause of weaving and speed fluctuation.
My ’14 Mercedes has this, and it’s hilariously terrible. Thankfully, it can be turned off and it stays off.
Given the W212 debuted in 2011, it has pretty primitive implementations of all of this camera-based warning stuff. Though the auto-braking did save me from a fender-bender when I got cut off in traffic once. Otherwise, the closing-speed alerts are hilariously bad too, and completely random. At least it’s never nailed the brakes randomly, as a couple rentals have.
As someone who drinks 6 or 7* cups of coffee a day, I don’t need no stinking light advising me to stop for a break. I do that after 2-3 hours on the road anyways.
* lame 6-7 meme not intended – I really do drink that many cups a day
6 to 7 cups is a good start!
If I’m driving, and I don’t already have a coffee, then something has gone terribly wrong.
I thought it was kind of cute when my Fusion did this. Interstate construction forced me onto the shoulder, and therefore rumble strips, so the coffee cup came up. If it was more insistent, I could maybe see it being annoying.
I’m not so sure about the camera based ones either. You can yawn and blink all you want in the day light but when the headlights turn all the sudden coffee cup comes up
Do they have the equivalent of Shabbat mode for Mormons who don’t want anything to do with hot tea or hot coffee?
Salt lake customs will install a swig light so they know to stop for a dirty soda
Might? Sometimes?
My lane-keeping assist got switched from “Aid” to “Notify” last week, and as I headed off to Utah it started nagging me to rest, because I kept edging the lane lines. I quick reset of the Advanced Cruise Control got me centered and cruising for my 10-hour drive. But boy, is that annoying!
They should correlate this data with the number of people who actually listened to their Wii games when it told them to take a break.
The only thing this study proves is that the Mazda system is crappy. It in no way shows that driver attention systems have no benefit. My daily driver does have a attention system and it at least does a few chimes and the screen shows a similar icon along with wording that says something like rest suggested. I have had it come on a couple of times on my car but often that is due to me reacting to conditions ie swerving around a pot hole, moving over because the car next to me is on the line or looks like they are about to cross the line or road markings that are fadded/missing.
I had a couple of cars that would randomly catch fire, stop charging the battery, or puke the coolant out all at once.
They were great for keeping me paying attention.
So, a borderline-shitbox vehicle with a battery that’s at least 8 years old and balding tires is the ultimate insurer of driver attention! And it costs nothing! 😀
I turn LKAS off (or all the way down if off is not an option) whenever I get in a vehicle that has it, so maybe that’s why I’ve never seen that light in my Mazda.
Rationale: when borrowing an HR-V for a trip to San Antonio on two different occasions, the aggressive LKAS could not account for lines that were not repainted for construction on I-10 and tried to pull me into concrete barriers more than once. It can fuck right the fuck off.
In my 3, I have it set to just vibrate the steering wheel, and it does so in two places on my way to work, every day without fail: one where the road splits and I keep left, and one at a specific on-ramp right before I exit off 45. I can be dead center of the lane and it still goes off.
lKAS totally freaks out in Brooklyn. Between the old trolly tracks occasionally emerging from the pavement and Con Ed painting lines on the street to indicate buried gas and electric infrastructure, my wife’s Subaru is always trying to hurl itself into crowds of pedestrians.
It’s like driving that car from that movie https://youtu.be/j6-yVoJTCo8
“It knows what it wants”
It makes me think of the werecar parody from Futurama.
https://youtu.be/OH4fQzJ0H4U?si=xNNP3v_Dnz0yFaL8
The solution is simple, drive 87 mph or faster then you won’t get the coffee warning.
The only time I tell my car to fuck off is when it tries to say I’m not paying attention. It never seems to be triggered by anything. Similar to when I’m totally relaxed at night, ready to go to bed, and my smart watch tells me my stress level has spiked, and maybe some peaceful music would do me some good. Like, what the hell man?
That’s somehow more annoying than the Subaru’s “Ignition has been on for 2 hours” no shit notification (all the more reason to drive with ESC off as it doesn’t pop up when in this or track mode on cars with that option). What other obvious things am I supposed to need pointed out? I don’t know if these kinds of things are intended to be insulting or if it’s like when a dumb person over-explains something simple to you because they had trouble understanding it themselves, but I’ve been wiping my own ass without prompting since I was a toddler, so that’s how long I’ve been advanced beyond the stage of deriving help from these alerts. Anyone who feels these kinds of things are helpful shouldn’t be trusted to drive or do much of anything else on their own. How do these people even function on a daily basis? In the words of my favorite old boss when presented with the cast of assorted mutants we used to get to do menial inspection work [shaking hands to temples] “Just answer one thing for me, that’s all I ask.” [hands gesturing up and down emphatically] “Who puts your pants on for you?“
That reminds me (in a much more annoying way) of when I’m watching sports and my TV threatens to turn off because I haven’t touched any controls for a while. Am I to be punished for being content with the volume level??
Yes! Or the microwave alerting insistently because I didn’t leap up and get the food the moment it was done when I’m using a microwave instead of doing real cooking so I don’t have to babysit the food. I’ll leave it in there as a bacteria culture growing experiment if I damn well want to! And it’s so loud while running, that it doesn’t need an alert. If I can’t hear that it stopped, I’m also probably too far to hear the alerts. The microwave has a mute function, though, so that’s a solved problem.
Speaking of microwaves, I think it’s just plain rude when they keep beeping after you open the door. Really that’s just poor project planning, I suppose. The dreaded Triple-P.
All the ones I’ve had shut off if you opened the door, but that would definitely be annoying. Back when I considered microwaving something out of the freezer to be cooking, I used to try to time it so that I opened it as it ended, but before the beeps went off like I was defusing some cheesy TV bomb just as the timer ran out.
I do that currently, especially during football season (it’s like timing the hike). I even call false start when there’s still :01 showing. No penalty though, I don’t throw part of the food in the trash or anything.
Our 2025 Mazda does this, and at first, I had to consult the manual (yes, in 2025 they are probably one of the last manufacturers to include an actual, physical manual-bless them!) and see WTH it meant. It’s cute, but ineffective as far as I’m concerned. OTOH, that lane departure stuff is a demon-it damn near steered me into a road divider one day for some reason, and it’s unsettling as hell when the steering wheel you’re holding decides to unexpectedly jerk away from the direction you were planning on going. I turn it off as soon as I get in the car, but the other half likes it, so we agree to disagree.
Something my wife had in the past would bleep and flash the warning at right around the same spot every time we drove it back from her folks. Maybe our old golf? it was time based and would keep beeping periodically until you clicked thru the menus and killed it… Super safe and helpful.