As vacation season begins in Canada, the insurer is encouraging motorists to use the tech properly.
Vacation season is heading into full swing in Canada, where a recent Allstate survey has found that motorists are annoyed by driver assistance technology and have been shutting it off.
The insurance company is hoping to emphasize the importance and benefit of using the tech as recommended.
To an increasing degree, vehicles are being equipped with driver assistance technology as a standard feature. These include vehicle proximity alerts, rear-view cameras and others. Some of this tech provides driving support for vehicle control. Other forms offer warnings and will activate when certain specific situations arise.
That said, an Allstate Insurance Company of Canada study conducted by Léger has revealed that drivers aren’t entirely taken with these features. The study was conducted in the province of Quebec, among whom only 35 percent claim they understand all the features available in their car. Another 16 percent said they do not completely understand them.
Over half of the respondents said they rarely or never use their driver assistance technology features.
Across the country, 52 percent of all respondents said that they rarely ever – or never at all – rely on the tech features meant to provide assistance on the road. Among those who rarely or never use the features, 42 percent said that they found the warnings distracting and 56 percent said that they had disabled at least one of them.
The research findings found that the two main reasons that respondents in Quebec were disabling the features were that they didn’t trust them (14 percent) and they found them to be a nuisance (63 percent).
“Vehicles today are equipped with a host of tools to improve safety on the road, but still many people don’t fully understand how to use them, get distracted by them or turn them off, especially on Quebec roads where orange cones in construction zones can cause an overabundance of alarms and warnings,” pointed out Allstate Agency Manager Carmine Venditti from the Montreal-East area.
That said, Allstate automotive insurance data regarding the use of driver assistance technology shows that vehicles equipped with more of these features have a lower 
claim frequency than vehicles equipped with only a rear-view camera. Still, it remains important for motorists to be aware of both the benefits and the limitations that their vehicle tech has to offer them and their safe driving.
