It only takes one button.
And yet, that one button is so important and so helpful, I’m surprised other automakers have not figured out how to make this work so fluidly.
I’m talking about the 2024 Land Rover Defender 110 S I tested recently. On the steering wheel, you’ll find a simple safety settings toggle that can adjust from high safety settings, to custom, to low safety with one quick button press.
The reason this is so novel, and actually could prevent some accidents, is that the safety settings in most vehicles these days require a degree in Automotive Engineering. You have to click, swipe, and press on so many options (hopefully while parked) that you might miss your lunch meeting and probably get impatient at the same time. Wading through menus means you might not use as many features, or miss them entirely.
On the Defender, you can switch between a whole group of safety settings, enabling a speed limit warning (which has both audible and visual cues), forward collision warning, and lane keeping quite easily. Let me walk through each of those real quick.
First, speed limit warnings are helpful — in most cases. They let you know if you are going too fast in a given area, and the chime is a reminder not just about the possibility of getting pulled over but much more importantly, that there’s a reason the speed is at that level. Going 50 in a 30MPH zone is not only pretty dumb but also dangerous.l
Forward collision warning is also very helpful in most cases, especially in heavy traffic as a reminder to keep your eyes on the road and the vehicle that might be slowing down suddenly. It is one of the best features for safety.
Lane assistance is obviously useful because you always want to stay centered in your lane. Swerving out of your lane can be dangerous for you and other drivers, but can also lead to other mishaps like striking a guardrail.
Yet, there’s also a balance here. Keeping all of these settings on at all times can lead to tuning them out and ignoring them. On a country road with no traffic, the speed limit warning might not be needed, especially if you aren;t planning on going over the limit.I tend to turn off forward collision warning when I know there are no other cars around.
In the Defender, there’s no need to fish around for all of these settings — it just takes one button to go from “high” safety to custom and then to low. A graphic in the display when you use this setting also shows you how the vehicle has adjusted — for example, if you use custom and turn off only the lane keeping, the lights on the side of the graphic turn off.
I do feel more people will use the safety settings when they know it is a quick button press. And, I would not be surprised if this started appearing in more and more cars as a way to toggle a group of safety settings right from the steering wheel. It’s a brilliant new option.