Tricking Lane Assist With A Water Bottle Is A Great Way To Have A Dumb Crash

‘Level 2’ driver assistance systems do not constitute autonomous driving. Sure, it’s awfully impressive to see something like Volvo‘s Pilot Assist or BMW‘s Driving Assistant Plus doing its thing, taking care of the steering, accelerating and braking. Some will even change lanes for you. But these systems have limitations, and once those limitations are reached, the driver has to be ready to take back over.

And yet, all the time we have moronic photos and videos cropping up of people abusing Level 2 systems, treating them as fully autonomous, fully infallible affairs. Yes, a lot of the time this does involve Tesla Autopilot, but just to show that owners of other vehicles are just as capable of driving assistance stupidity, we have this Peugeot 508 driver in Romania.

We don’t have any Romanian speakers in the office, but according to the video description, the driver - who is in the back seat of the Peugeot - is bragging about how good the lane assist function is. The rest is fairly self-explanatory. There’s a bottle of water wedged in Peugeot’s trademark tiny steering wheel, tricking the system into thinking there’s a hand on the wheel. Unfortunately, we have seen devices before that are specifically made for this purpose.

See also: Backseat Tesla Driver Taunts Police, Gets Arrested (Again)

Soon, a slip lane comes up, and the car simply veers over it, off the road and onto the verge. Although it’s hard to tell from the potato-spec 240p footage and the general chaos, it looks as though the 508 rolled over. The icing on the cake of this tragicomedy? Cutting Crew’s ‘Died in Your Arms’ can be heard playing on the sound system.

Thankfully, there wasn’t any dying going on here - by the looks of it both occupants avoided serious injury, and no other vehicles were involved.

Via Jalopnik