EU Mandates In-Cabin Driver Attention Cameras in All New Cars From July 2026

From July 7, 2026, every new car sold in the European Union must ship with an Advanced Driver Distraction Warning (ADDW) system under the bloc’s General Safety Regulation. The setup relies on an infrared camera mounted near the dash or steering column that tracks the driver’s eye gaze. It switches on automatically above roughly 20 km/h, cannot be permanently turned off, and alerts the driver via light, sound, or vibration when their eyes leave the road for more than 3.5 seconds at highway speed (or six seconds at lower speeds).

Regulators built in a privacy guardrail: the system is supposed to run as a ‘closed loop,’ processing biometric data on-device without shipping it to automakers or third parties, and GDPR applies on top of that. But the article flags real gaps — there is no independent audit to confirm the closed loop holds, no defined retention periods, and no clear standard for what data counts as ‘necessary.’ A breach of gaze or footage data could expose granular patterns about a driver’s routine, location, and passengers.

The skepticism isn’t hypothetical. The piece points to a 2024 New York Times investigation revealing that GM, Honda, Acura, Kia, Hyundai, and Mitsubishi funneled driver-behavior data to brokers LexisNexis and Verisk, which packaged it into risk scores sold to insurers. That track record is the crux of the concern: mandatory in-cabin cameras create a rich new biometric data source whose real-world handling depends on enforcement that currently doesn’t exist.