Disabling front cross traffic alert

Why?

This is why: when l am nosing out into rapidly moving traffic (i.e., how nearly all normal drivers enter a perpendicular roadway with traffic) and am very carefully looking in all directions (as all normal drivers do), the idiotic audio FCTA warning goes off, which then forces me to move my attention from the outside of the car (where it should be) to the inside of the car to see what in the bloody hell is going on.

Then, l see that it is another spurious FCTA warning and then l must return my attention to the situation outside of the car. And the FCTA system forces me to do this every time, and this stupid unnecessary distraction is terrible for situational awareness and safety. It is a case of 'the boy who cried wolf': constant unneeded spurious warnings (of vehicles that I can easily and readily see with my own two eyes) decrease, they do not increase, safety.

(That said, I feel totally differently about RCTA system, as it is profoundly useful because it warns me about traffic that I cannot see.)

 

I am sure that is the case. But I have used my naked eyeballs to operate motor vehicles for many decades and I have never been in need for a system to warn me about what I can already see. And not just see, but see very, very easily, as these cars (the cross traffic) are right in front of the car and right in front of my face.

The problem is that having a warning system that tells about something that you already see reduces safety, it does not improve it. In the end, it just trains you to ignore the spurious warning. Which is not a good thing.

Now, if the FCTA system could warn me about vehicles that I cannot see (as the RCTA system does), that would be a different thing. But it does not do this. Hence, my desire to deactivate FCTA because, in this case, doing that would improve driver safety.