False Alerts in ADAS: Why Driver Trust Is the Biggest Road Safety Challenge in India

Table of contents

India’s Road Safety Crisis Demands Better ADAS

Alert Fatigue: A Serious ADAS Problem in Indian Traffic

Why Camera-Only ADAS Systems Struggle in India

How Radar-Based ADAS with Confidence Scoring Solves the Problem

Starkenn’s Approach: Precision Over Sensitivity

Why Trust Is the Most Important ADAS Metric

Conclusion: Building ADAS That Drivers Trust Can Save Lives

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are designed to reduce accidents and save lives. Globally, they are seen as a major step toward safer roads. But in India, one critical issue is quietly reducing their real-world effectiveness: false alerts.

When ADAS systems issue frequent or inaccurate warnings, drivers begin to ignore them. This phenomenon, known as alert fatigue, erodes driver trust. And once trust is lost, even the most advanced safety system becomes ineffective.

For ADAS to truly improve road safety in India, precision matters more than sensitivity. At Starkenn Technologies, building trusted and reliable ADAS systems for Indian traffic conditions is a core design priority.

India’s Road Safety Crisis Demands Better ADAS

India has one of the highest road accident rates in the world.

• In 2023, India recorded approximately 4.8 lakh road accidents, leading to 172,890 deaths and 462,825 injuries.

• That translates to nearly 55 accidents and 20 deaths every hour.

• A large percentage of fatalities involve people aged 18 to 45, the country’s most economically active population.

• Preliminary 2024 data indicates road deaths rose further to around 1.77 lakh fatalities.

These numbers underline a harsh reality: India urgently needs safety systems that work reliably in real traffic, not just controlled test environments.

Alert Fatigue: A Serious ADAS Problem in Indian Traffic

Indian roads are unlike those in most Western markets. Multiple vehicle types : cars, trucks, two-wheelers, auto-rickshaws, cyclists, and pedestrians share the same space. Traffic behavior is dense, dynamic, and often unpredictable.

In these conditions, many ADAS systems generate excessive warnings, such as:

• Frequent collision alerts in slow-moving or stop-and-go traffic

• False lane departure warnings on narrow or unmarked roads

• Repeated blind-spot alerts triggered by harmless nearby objects

When alerts become constant noise, drivers stop reacting to them.

Alert fatigue is not a driver problem. It is a system design problem.And in a high-risk environment like India, it can be dangerous.

Why Camera-Only ADAS Systems Struggle in India

Many current ADAS implementations rely heavily on camera-based perception. While cameras perform well on structured highways and in ideal lighting, Indian conditions pose serious challenges.

Common issues with vision-only ADAS systems include:

• Reduced visibility in rain, fog, dust, and pollution

• Performance drops due to glare, shadows, and poor lighting

• Difficulty detecting small, fast-moving two-wheelers

• High false positives in dense, mixed traffic environments

The result is over-sensitive ADAS systems that warn too often and too early leading directly to loss of driver trust.

How Radar-Based ADAS with Confidence Scoring Solves the Problem

Radar-based sensing offers a critical advantage in Indian driving conditions. Radar directly measures distance, speed, and relative motion, independent of lighting or weather.

When combined with confidence scoring, radar-based ADAS goes beyond basic detection.

Radar confidence scoring allows systems to:

• Track object behavior over time

• Distinguish real threats from irrelevant objects

• Prioritize alerts based on actual collision probability

• Suppress unnecessary or low-risk warnings

This shift from sensitivity to confidence-driven decision-making dramatically reduces false alerts and restores driver trust.

Starkenn’s Approach: Precision Over Sensitivity

At Starkenn Technologies, trust is treated as a core safety metric.

Our ADAS systems are designed specifically for Indian traffic complexity, with a focus on:

• Radar-first detection for consistent performance

• Intelligent object tracking in high-density traffic

• Confidence-based alert logic instead of raw sensitivity

• Advanced filtering to eliminate noise before warnings reach the driver

This approach ensures that alerts are rare, relevant, and respected exactly how safety systems should function.

In a country where most accidents still result from human error, false alerts are more than an inconvenience. They directly undermine safety.

Why Trust Is the Most Important ADAS Metric

An ignored warning has zero safety value.

For ADAS to succeed in India:

• Alerts must be accurate and context-aware

• Systems must understand diverse traffic behaviors

• Confidence scoring and redundancy must replace over-sensitivity

Starkenn’s radar-based ADAS models are built around these principles, enabling safer driver interaction and better real-world outcomes.

Conclusion: Building ADAS That Drivers Trust Can Save Lives

False alerts quietly kill trust and reduce the effectiveness of ADAS on Indian roads. With hundreds of thousands of crashes and fatalities each year, precision and reliability are not optional.

ADAS must evolve beyond basic detection. They must deliver confidence-based decisions that drivers trust and respond to instinctively.

At Starkenn Technologies, building trusted ADAS systems for India is central to our mission. Because in a country where lives are lost every hour on the road, technology that drivers trust can make the difference between warning and impact and between life and death.