The last Outback I drove had that infuriating iSight system. Even driving normally would trigger it (and I'm a defensive driver). I ended up disabling it each time I got in the car, as it was safer with that crap off. It was a "song and dance" I've had to do with a handful of cars, pressing various buttons before you even release the park brake, to disable things like auto stop/start which just re-enable themselves next time you start the vehicle.
EyeSight does nothing unless you enable cruise control -- or are about to crash into something. If you use cruise control in an EyeSight-equipped car then it works exactly the same as any other car if there is no one else around, but if you catch up to someone then it decreases your speed to match theirs rather then running straight up their tail-pipe. At least if the closing speed is low enough. If you're doing 80 mph and they're doing 30 (or stopped) then detection may be too late and all it can do is soften the crash. It's a driver aid, not "You can go to sleep now".
That's the issue, the system randomly thought I was going to crash into a vehicle in front, when I was already on the brake and had plenty of distance to stop. It's almost like the system was too slow to respond to all the inputs and went into panic mode. Perhaps the newer version is better, but I couldn't drive with it on. Correct me if I'm wrong but Subaru relied on a vision system to determine speed and distance from vehicle in front, as opposed to, radar and/or lidar in other vehicles.
I'm always vigilant when driving, probably more-so than 95% of people on the road. I was also a police driver trainer in my past job so I'm not the kind of driver to be too close to the vehicle in front, or slow to respond in the event of a sudden application of brakes by vehicles ahead of me.
All this driver assist stuff that newer cars seem to have, I wonder if you had an accident and they were turned off, could your insurance company use this as an excuse to try and wriggle out of covering you? Likely they could scan the main computer to check the state of a multitude of things at the time of the accident.
If you are at fault in the crash then you are at fault even if you have driver aids turned on. Until such time as they remove the steering wheel and pedals entirely, at least.
If you are not at fault in the crash then driver aids on or off also obviously do not affect that.
Correct. It's not a defence (by either party) to either refuse a claim because you turned off driver aids, or you assert you're not at fault because the driver aids didn't stop your vehicle from hitting another.*
And yes, the ECU among other systems in almost all modern cars will record this kind of data, plus very granular data about things like the throttle/accelerator pedal position, steering wheel position, whether your hands were on the wheel or not, vehicle dynamics and forces, speed, location, the list goes on... In most claims however they aren't going to pay someone to extract that data from your vehicle. If there someone was seriously injured or killed, or there is a suspicion of a fraudulent claim, then they (or the police) probably will.
EDIT: * At least not at the time of writing, however this is why you always need to read the contract/PDS that came with your policy. Some insurers are more stringent than others with what you can and can't do with your own vehicle. The insurer typically would need to prove that you either disobeyed the road rules, operated a vehicle in an unsafe/unroadworthy condition, or you were acting in a negligent/dangerous manner (none of which include disabling driver aids).
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