Research shows one in five drivers admit disabling car safety features
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For many drivers, the safety features of new cars takes some getting used to. (ABC News: Taryn Southcombe)
An analysis by insurance company AAMI of 480,000 claims over the past year shows 20 per cent of drivers admit they sometimes turn off features in the car that are designed to improve safety.
Steve Cratchley, motor insights and operations manager at AAMI, said the most commonly disabled features were lane keeping assist, lane departure warnings, autonomous emergency braking, and autonomous cruise control.
Of the 20 per cent who did disable the features, 69 per cent said it was because they found the safety features annoying, distracting, and too sensitive.
Twenty-three per cent said they did not think they needed safety assistance features, and 13 per cent said they did not trust them.
Automated driver assistance features are designed to improve safety on the road. (ABC News: Kenith Png)
Lane departure warning and lane keeping assist were the most disliked features.
Mr Cratchley said it was in drivers' best interests to keep the features enabled.
"They're designed to avoid crashes, so we're really encouraging people who have this technology to learn what they mean, to understand how they work and to actually have them switched on rather than disabled," he told Nadia Mitsopoulos on ABC Radio Perth.
New cars bring big changes
Mr Cratchley said switching to a new car with safety features they had not used before was a big adjustment for many drivers."People like my father, for example. He's been a truck driver, he's driven for 60-odd years, and when he got his last car he immediately called me and said: 'Look, Steve, how do I turn all this off? It's annoying me. It's trying to kill me,'" he said.
"But the reality is, he was driving against this technology, against these safety features.
"What he found is that, as he learnt what the bells and whistles and the lights and the mirrors and these sort of things were actually advising him, he became a safer driver, and that meant that those around him were also safer and potentially would have fewer accidents."
AAMI's crash report also found that nose-to-tail accidents were the most common, something that emergency braking and forward collision warning systems were designed to help prevent.
"As some of my peers have found when they've got their first new car in many years, it really is a case of working with the dealer when you pick up that new vehicle and understanding how these features work and then working with them rather than working against them or disabling them," Mr Cratchley said.
Text messages from ABC Radio Perth listeners revealed a deep dislike of adaptive safety features in new vehicles.
Overtaking cyclists with lane keeping assistance enabled is challenging for some drivers. (ABC News: James Carmody)
Others pointed out that passing could be unnerving when the lane keeping feature was enabled.
Lane departure assist, which forces a car back between white lines, is disabled if a driver turns on their indicator.
But for some motorists, the safety supports in modern cars were very welcome.
Written by: Emma Wynne, ABC News.
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, and I’ve just discovered that it doesn’t have headlight washers & wipers, I don’t know how I’ll cope. 
