Small-eyed electric car drivers suffer safety score deductions as NIO sets up working group to study the issue

Today's smart cars have turned out to increasingly be a problem for drivers with smaller eyes like Chang Yan. His first encounter with the Smart Cruise system of General Motors was disastrous in the sense that GM's Driver Monitoring System (DMS) constantly counted him distracted. This was followed by bad experiences with nearly every driver-assisting software that he had the displeasure to use, save for his first encounter with Tesla's Autopilot that relies on steering wheel feedback instead of cameras and infrared to detect if a driver seems to be falling asleep.

The XPeng P7 electric car, for instance, kept showing a distracted driving warning, while another smart SUV blasted cold air on him during the winter to keep him awake when the DMS consistently thought that he is falling asleep. Another electric car driver with smaller eyes and big social media following - DerekTLM - shared his bad DMS experience with an XPeng vehicle, too, whose Navigation Guided Pilot started deducted safety score points from his count for distracted driving. On June 26, for instance, it took off 2 points from his 100-point score for "prolonged distraction," then one point for "frequent distraction".

While you can turn Driver Monitoring Systems off, Chang Yan argued, the reflection on your safety score is a potential long-term problem. Tesla, for instance, relied on the driver's score to give them Full Self-Driving Beta access and the Chinese brands use it for granting wider autonomous driving system privileges, too. Both XPeng and NIO, whose ET7 performance sedan Chang now drives, have vowed to investigate and resolve the issue. NIO immediately "set up a study group on me overnight, and this DMS issue is going to be an area where they compete with each other," mulled Chang.

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