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Comment by ben1040 | Hacker News Reader

This looks like the "Sensing" feature that Honda has implemented on some of their other vehicles. I just bought a 2016 Accord that does the same thing -- there's a camera mounted on the windshield, another camera in the front grille, and a radar sensor on the front bumper.

Calling it "self-driving" is kind of a misnomer and I think the article kind of blows it out of proportion.

It will track the car in front of you and keep a safe following distance, keeping either the maximum cruise control speed you've set, or whatever speed the vehicle ahead of you is driving, whichever is slower. It will accelerate or brake accordingly. It will also attempt to stay in the lane by using the onboard cameras for tracking the lane markings.

The lane keeping assist is not nearly as autonomous as the article makes it out to be. It does not like to work on sharper curves on the freeway, for one -- the system will disengage and tell you to steer manually. It still wants you to keep your hands on the wheel. It must be looking for very very subtle movements on the wheel, because the system will yell at you if you take your hands off the wheel for longer than 10-15 seconds.

All in all it's a pretty cool feature for longer road trips (keeping in your lane can just get kind of tiring, even with cruise control) but it's not the sort of autonomous driving that the article here paints it out to be.

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Free-market ideology if you ask me. The first sentence suggests the hapless government wants to spent $4 billion on research for something you you can have today for $20K. A little later it mentions Washington's "time and billions" spent on fuel-efficiency instead of "saving lives". The government has also funded electric-car research and encouraged Detroit to build them. Contrasting self-driving with electric drive is just another way to suggest the dead hand of bureaucracy is impeding the invisible hand of the market.

By the way, the government has saved drivers' lives, too, by the thousands, more often than not over industry objection. Seat belts, unleaded fuel, crumple zones: it's a long list. The article's bias isn't just bias; it slants away from the facts.

How is this in any way a reply to the parent comment?

As ben1040 put it, "the article blows [self-driving] out of proportion." Jklowden hypothesizes that WSJ blew it out of proportion in order to paint a picture that the government is wasting money at best and not letting the free market innovate at worst. It wouldn't surprise me that a publication like Wall Street Journal would advocate in favor of a free market.

Yes, the WSJ is known for its free-market ideology :)

But I think they have a point. The gov't has largely focused on fuel economy for decades now, while tens of thousands of people continued to die or suffer horrible injuries in cars. Sure, seat belts, crumple zones -- a good start. Unleaded? Not sure how that saves you in a crash.

Unleaded fuel doesn't save lives in a crash, but it saves lives just the same by reducing the impact of pollution.

That point doesn't make any sense to me. The government has focused on fuel economy, yes, but it has also focused on safety.

> Yes, the WSJ is known for its free-market ideology :)

Yes, in its editorials. But it's otherwise known for quality, more-or-less objective journalism, which makes this article a bit of a disappointment.

Then again, I'm reminded of that Paul Graham article about working with newspapers―pretty much any topic except politics or war, according to him, is written about because someone with an interest pitched the article to the author. Perhaps Honda has more to do with this article's bent than the WSJ editors.

> Then again, I'm reminded of that Paul Graham article about working with newspapers

Precisely:

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/koch-electric-vehicles_u...

> But it's otherwise known for quality, more-or-less objective journalism

Sorry but no. Ever since Murdoch took over and replaced the editors the quality has noticeably dropped with a lot more inherent bias even in the non-editorial content.

And within the editorial section the change is pretty clear. It's shifted from being centrist to at times being on the hard right.

Even with politics (and by extension, war). The opposition will be routinely pitching stories to counter whoever is in power.

A huge percentage of stories are pitched by PR companies. I once shared office space with a PR company and saw how much it happened; it's eye-opening. The story in the careers lift-out of the paper - pitched as a profile for a new CEO of their client. The article about working from home, pitched to get a mention for the new consultancy client.

I would say that crime stories might be some of the only ones unaffected. But even then, the stories about crime statistics can be pitched - the giveaway will be a quote from security screen manufacturers or an industry rep.

Unleaded fuel has saved many lives and probably prevents a lot of crime. There are plenty of studies that show a correlation between lead and crime rates.

Seat belts were invented by English engineer George Cayley in the mid-19th century,[3] though Edward J. Claghorn of New York, was granted the first patent.

The government did not invent the seatbelt. All it did was monopolize it through the patent system and later criminalize not wearing it. How heroic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt

I didn't mean to suggest the government invented seat belts. It did mandate them, not only wearing them, but circa 1964 their very availability in cars. The industry, and a fair number of car buyers, didn't want buyers to be reminded that cars could be dangerous.

Heroic? No, but what government is heroic? That seat belts and seat belt laws save lives every year is indisputable. Perhaps to you that's an impermissible curtailment on your right to die in a crash. It might help to remember also benefit indirectly through lower insurance premiums.

(In answer down thread to why I posted my reply, apologies. I meant to reply to another question about why the article mentioned electric cars, but clicked the wrong link.)

I don't think that's true. Nash had made them standard years before, multiple other manufacturers had them as options, and Ford promoted cars with their Lifeguard system[1], including sealtbelts, long before those laws.

The reality is that people didn't care, as evidenced by the fact that in 1981, thirteen years after seatbelts became mandatory in all cars, the CDC estimated that only 11% of car occupants used them[2].

[1] https://books.google.pt/books?id=1FQEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA47&lpg=PA...

[2] http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/seatbeltbrief/

It was stupid for this article to start talking about the $4 billion Obama has talked about for research.

This article is about features and not a real self driving car. If anything the features make this car very dangerous in the hands of people concerned with their phones and tablets and kind of proves the need for investments like the $4 billion.

To me it sounds like the free market is about to make the road damn dangerous for the rest of us. To quote the article, "For instance, some owners have posted videos of hands- and foot-free driving on YouTube and the car inevitably makes a mistake.".

In all fairness, the assistive driving features introduced to date are probably a net win. (After all, they've been available on high-end vehicles.) However, we're probably approaching the point where the automation is sufficient that people will routinely stop paying attention given that it "mostly works" for highway driving in good weather.

"mostly works" can get you eventually killed on a highway

In cases like these, if a collision occurs, who is at fault? Presumably it is the "driver", especially in this case, right? But if/when this gets into the court system, when do people start going after the "self-driving" manufacturers, who have much, much deeper pockets than your average car owner.

Especially if people start arguing that the manufacturers are effectively going "pay full attention at all times. Nudge. Nudge. Wink. Wink." knowing that people routinely don't pay attention when automated systems like these are used.

There are places in the world(I saw it in Netherlands) where you have a "cruise control forbidden" signs. Yes, even the dumb cruise control that only holds a set speed. I saw those signs near construction zones and such, I guess the idea is that people should pay 100% attention in there.

To me (who, to be fair, has no experience in this area), it seems that the only long term solution to this liability issue is a government-funded and controlled fund accompanied by legal changes prohibiting these cases from going to "normal" court.

For something that is a demonstrable way of saving huge numbers of lives, but still carries some risk, using the model of the vaccination side effect fund seems like a good one to me.

For complete self-driving cars, it's seems obvious that the manufacturer should be liable. And a lot of people want it that way:

- Google wants to be liable. - The passengers doesn't want to be liable. - Insurance companies would perhaps like to go after the entity with deeper pockets, too?

This, unsurprisingly, has generally been the death of previous attempts at automated cars, especially when the efforts included modified roads and attempts to have cars form convoys to cut down on air resistance. [1]

[1] Granted, this is anecdotal, but it comes from a former faculty member who taught my control systems course in college. Last I heard he was working on systems for auto landing UAVs on aircraft carriers. He had worked on a number of grants related to autonomous driving and said that every time they had something technologically ready the lawyers basically couldn't find a way to make it happen.

This is what happens when Rupert Murdoch runs a "news" source.

Also the $4b isn't for research, it's for regulation and testing, according to

http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self...

Oh, and efficiency saves lives in and off itself. (One possible path, using less oil for cars, we can use more oil instead of coal in other applications. Thus mining less coal. Coal mines are crazy dangerous per Joule mined comparatively.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.

The only solution out of this paradox with respect to carbon fuels is taxation. Unfortunately, as much as we'd like, a global carbon tax regime is not practical, nor enforceable. So we're stuck.

Doesn't need to be global. European countries (and others) had high taxes on petrol for a while now. Extending that to a general carbon tax might be workable.

That doesn't stop it from pushing coal out a bit.

Isn't that mostly a pro-business ideology?

(They overlap quite a bit. But eg business don't like competition, especially foreign competition. But competition exactly one of the reasons the market works well for society.)

I imagine a free-market ideologue could make a point like: the government shouldn't spend money on fuel-efficiency, just put a tax on emissions and let the market figure it out.

I've got the same car and you're dead on.

I really wanted the automatic cruise control but the truth is it's a hassle in the city on the highway. I don't want to constantly adjust the distance between the car in front of me and my car as conditions change so I end up just managing it myself without cruise control or setting it 'classic' mode where it doesn't use the radar.

That said shortly after I bought the car I drove it across state and the automatic cruise control and lane keep were FANTASTIC. I know the lane keep seems kind of lazy but when you're driving across the plains with heavy cross winds it makes things SO much easier. Really a road trip feature.

The 'you must steer' alert is fun. I've discovered one or two places near my house where the street is straight enough (along with the alignment on my car) that it will briefly trigger some times. Note that it's ALWAYS active (unless you turn it off), it's not only in use when you're using the lane keep function.

EDIT:

Also, sadly, Honda doesn't have a full-stop automatic cruise control like some other brands. If the traffic gets too slow it will disengage and warn you that you're in control. It's never something you could use on a standard street, highway only.

>I really wanted the automatic cruise control but the truth is it's a hassle in the city on the highway.

Yeah, that's one thing I've noticed. Of the three options you get for following distance, even the "closest" one leaves a pretty long gap between you and the vehicle ahead of you.

So people will pass you, pull into that gap, and then your car will slow down to open up a long gap between them and you. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It still works well for long drives or when traffic is quite light. I'm glad I have it. Just not the panacea I was hoping for.

I REALLY wanted the automatic breaking, and I'm glad I have that.

yeah, the automatic braking is worth it. Yesterday someone abruptly cut me off; the car hit the brakes to avoid a collision more quickly than I would have reacted myself.

I've only had it go off once when someone did something stupid (don't remember what). I was paying attention and slammed the brake on as fast as I could.

Didn't matter. I could feel how easy it was to push the brake in. The car had started to brake a few milliseconds before I could.

I would have been fine in that case since I was already paying full attention, but I was glad to know it was working. I live in an area with occasional deer on the highway and I've had VERY close run-ins before.

I'm very glad to have the feature.

That sounds more like a problem with other drivers than with the cruise control system. Most drivers leave far too little distance between themselves and the next car in moderate to heavy traffic.

That's sad that it doesn't handle heavy traffic well. That should be where it does best. Tesla's system, for example, is nice on the open road but absolutely wonderful in heavy traffic.

Too bad about not handling full stops, too. I wonder if that's a technical limitation, or if it's just something they didn't want to allow.

Tesla switched to electromechanical brakes with the introduction of it's Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (“autopilot”) system. https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/your-autopilot-has-arrived says “In October of last year we started equipping Model S with hardware to allow for the incremental introduction of self-driving technology: […] and a high-precision digitally-controlled electric assist braking system.”

On the one hand, this makes it sound like a technical limitation with hydraulic brakes.

On the other hand, learning the response of your particular car's brakes seems similar to a number of tasks that the car automation has to do anyway. It's a different program and running on different processors, but ABS is an existence proof of this and works fine with a variety of braking systems.

I'd be interested in hearing from someone who knows more about automative systems and automation.

Restarting from a full stop requires good pedestrian awareness. In city traffic, there might be people crossing in front of the car when it's stopped. Restart also requires getting the driver back on line. They're probably on a phone. That's why some driver input to start motion is desirable.

The user interface problems for automatic driving are very tough.

I don't think the parent was talking about restarting from a full stop, it looks to me like he was saying that his car's radar-cruise system won't actually stop the car in heavy traffic, so if you're not paying attention and don't brake manually in time, you could rear-end someone.

Honda's system cuts out at some 'slow' speed like 35mph. If you don't do anything the car should fully stop but that's because you'll trigger the automatic emergency breaking.

The problem with the system is it's relatively simplistic. You set a following distance (there are 4 options) and the car will never get closer to the car in front of you than you've specified. It will slow down as necessary to maintain that distance.

This works fine on empty highways but in traffic it doesn't help. Since it won't go to (and resume) from a full stop you have to fiddle with it constantly. In tight traffic the distance has to be modified or people will continually jump in front of you (causing the car to slow down and back off).

I'll also say that it waits a surprisingly long time to start braking to the point it can be a little unnerving at times. I know it knows there is a car there (there is a symbol on the dash to show that it sees a car) but it doesn't act until you get much closer.

A system like Tesla or Volvo have that can bring the car to a stop and then speed back up or could decide to try to maintain a distance similar to that other drivers are maintaining would be much nicer.

Still for long trips the Honda system is great. And you can always put it in 'dumb' cruise control mode if necessary.

It seems weird that it would need to brake at all most of the time to maintain a following distance. Unless the car in front of you suddenly brakes or you're going down a steep hill or something, wind resistance usually provides all the braking you need at highway speeds.

It's usually more an issue when someone is getting on/off the highway and isn't at a reasonable speed.

But that's kind of the issue. At times I think if the car just let off the gas earlier it wouldn't need to brake.

Wow, I'm glad I didn't get a Honda and pay a premium for such a system. I got a Mazda3 instead, and the radar cruise control in that is excellent. I cruise all the time at 30mph in it (I work at a facility where I have to drive a couple miles at that speed to get to my building), around turns even. It'll come to a complete stop if the person in front of me stops.

I'll also add that on my Mazda, there's a button on the steering wheel to adjust the following distance. There's only 4 choices like the Honda's. It appears to be selecting by car lengths, so this distance would be greater (at the same setting) at higher speeds than at lower speeds. I haven't used it enough yet to really verify this though, but it seems to be the case, and seems nonsensical to design it any other way: of course you're going to want to follow at a greater distance at higher speeds. In practice, I don't have to fiddle with mine much at all; I just set a speed and leave it there. But I also don't use it in tight traffic; I wouldn't trust it for that, and I'm sure I do a better job of driving smoothly (and fuel-efficiently) since I can see what other cars are doing around me and use my predictive ability, rather than constantly speeding up and slowing down as people change lanes in front of me as you say. (If traffic's not too tight, and is fairly smooth, I will use it though, but I do reduce the following distance to the second-lowest setting or sometimes lowest. But I wouldn't use it in stop-and-go bumper-to-bumper traffic.)

I don't believe there's a way to set mine in "dumb cruise control" mode. I'm not sure why you'd want to. It acts like normal CC as long as there's no one in front going slower than you, and if there is someone going slower, you're either going to want to slow down, or go around them. One thing that'd be nice, though, would be an additional indicator showing the speed of the vehicle ahead so I can see the speed differential and decide when/if to change lanes.

I think that with cars that offer 'full stop' cruise control the driver must press a button to indicate that they're ready to roll again after the car has stopped it's self (or perhaps tap the gas).

Not positive, that what I remember hearing. That way it's still the driver's responsibility, but it's easy enough that it doesn't annoy the driver.

Tesla's doesn't. At least not 99% of the time(occasionally I'll get a hold message but most of the time it just resumes).

Oddly, it used to require manual intervention to resume after any stop longer than five seconds. Then they bumped it up to 30 seconds on highways. Then they (mostly) removed it.

Yeah I've only seen it twice since the last major ap update.

The Model S now only requires human intervention if it has detected obstacles (e.g. pedestrians) while stopped, otherwise it should be able to resume automatically.

Mercedes has some sort of timer, if the car's been stopped for more than maybe five seconds, I have to tap the gas to get it rolling again.

Restarting from a full stop requires good pedestrian awareness.

Cars that accelerate automatically from a stop already have the radar/ultrasonic sensors necessary for collision avoidance. So they should never accelerate into a pedestrian (and not allow you to, either!).

If anything, collision avoidance systems have better pedestrian/cyclist awareness than human drivers do, since they can "see" objects in blind spots, etc.

Oh man, all this.

I thought Autopilot was nifty but it wasn't until I slogged through ~40 minutes of rush hour without touching the pedals or wheel when I realized how awesome it really was.

It's useful at-speed but the killer app really is rush hour traffic.

I thought Autopilot was nifty but it wasn't until I slogged through ~40 minutes of rush hour without touching the pedals or wheel when I realized how awesome it really was.

Which car can do this?

All Autopilot equipped Teslas.

High-end Mercedes/BMW/Audi/Lexus have had these features for years now, although they still force you to keep your hands on the wheel, presumably for liability issues.

(And it's still awesome, it makes stop-and-go traffic bearable)

having to keep hands on the wheel vs not touching it at all (as vvanders wrote) shows how much trust car manufacturers have in their systems

I think that's just a matter of risk tolerance. The traditional manufacturers are taking it slow because they have a huge potential downside, and limited upside. Having the best autonomous system on the market wins some sales. Being on the receiving end of Toyota Unintended Acceleration II: Autonomous Boogaloo would be a disaster. So they're taking it easy.

Tesla is in "go big or go home" mode. They intend to grow sales by a factor of ten in five years. They have no history and are just beginning to build brand loyalty, so they want to show everyone that they're the best. That makes them much more willing to take risks.

I blame Elon Musk for this shift in the meaning of "self-driving".

It used to be a term that was only applied to driverless cars, but last year Elon announced that they plan to make the Tesla a self-driving car at the same time as announcing similar driver assistance features.

While Tesla's driver assistance features are much more advanced than these, it's not much of a stretch after Elon already fired the first marketing shot by shifting the goalpost of what it means to be "self-driving" so much.

Language is organic and constantly changing. I used to insist on calling my drone, a remote controlled quadcopter, as drones were those autonomous military vehicles dropping bombs on weddings in the Middle East. But everyone now from the news to the FAA calls my little RC toy, a drone.

Sure, it bothers me to watch words like self-driving and hoverboard lose their meaning. If someone as influential as Obama can't protect my favorite Egyptian god, Isis, there's no point in blaming anyone or trying to fight it.

When you put it that way, it's really interesting to think of it as a language shift rather than just a question of marketing honesty. If the average person describes the car he already owns as "self-driving", perhaps that will accelerate acceptance of real driverless cars.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if these are the same people who call the picture on their desktop their "screensaver."

That and calling a forward slash a backslash....

Don't forget "hacker":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(term)#Hacker_definitio...

and my favourite "coder"

I'm not a coder, I'm a programmer, I lack the lumberjack shirt, skinny jeans and macbook.

Related to terminology of what people who write computer programs call themselves:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

After reading that same article a half dozen times since starting my career, I still don't know what to call myself.

Engineer? I don't have an engineering degree. Computer Scientist? The stuff I do feels a lot more engineering than science-- I have never completed a formal scientific methodology when writing code. Besides, my profs at university do a lot more talking/writing than coding. Programmer? As others have said, this cheapens me to the simple action that I take, not the problems that I solve. Developer? Along with being conflated with Real Estate Developers, this does very little to describe even the domain of my expertise. Is a chef a food developer?

When did he shift the goalpost?

People are indeed quite confused about what current driver assist features are capable of, but Tesla has been quite clear about exactly what they offer now, what they plan to offer in the near term, and what they hope to offer in the longer term.

The main problem I've seen people complain about is the use of the word "autopilot" to describe Tesla's features. And that's only because people don't understand what a real airplane autopilot does. I blame the general population for jumping to conclusions.

I agree with everything you say, and to me the goalposts shifted because he was purposely ambiguous in the way he announced autopilot at the same time as promising a fully self-driving car soon. So now a self-driving car isn't going to be a whole new product, but an accumulation of added features, one of which is autopilot. The implication is that cars with radars and lane detection are already self-driving cars that just need a few more upgrades to cover that other 20% of the time that you're not on the highway.

I just want to say, I have a similar vehicle system (Eyesight, rather than Honda Sensing) and I agree with everything you are saying. It isn't self-driving, it is just a bunch of really cool driver assist technology.

Unfortunately the reason why these systems fail on sharp turns is that the lane-line literally falls outside of the camera's vision. Aside from adding two more cameras (which I'd welcome) I cannot see them fixing it in software.

I totally would have purchased a 2016 Accord but no all-wheel-drive option. To me AWD, Blind Spot, Cross Traffic, and Eyesight made for one amazing overall safety package. The Accord has some nice unique features (e.g. Android Auto) but they need more than just Honda Sensing as OPTIONS.

I'm impressed Honda is offering it on all models (LX, Sport, EX, EX-L, Touring) instead of saying "Sorry, Touring only".

Now that I've had Honda Sensing for a few months I really like (in a rental right now and miss parts of it), but I'd like real blind spot indicators and the cross traffic alert.

Either way, serious upgrade from a 'dumb' car.

Agreed - my wife just bought a new Subaru with the Eyesight package. I was very dubious at first, but after a few long freeway trips, I'd much rather drive her car than my older vehicle. I believe that Subaru in Japan has published some impressive statistics about accident reduction with the Eyesight package. IMO, these technologies should be mandated on all new cars.

Subaru has the best overall value with their Eyesight system when considered with the rest of the car IMHO. It's why I bought my Forester (not in the price range of the Civic). Definitely not self driving, but adaptive cruise control works in steady traffic- it has a tendency to "rubber-band" when traffic changes speeds- and has saved my bacon by preventing a collision when the car in front of me stopped. The only downside is that it is fully camera based and has no radar at all, and on a road trip heading west this winter the setting sun killed the Eyesight system and the cruise control completely disengaged and I had to manually control my speed for about an hour.

AWD is actually not that important in safe driving. AWD ensures you can always go forward. In a bad situation you don't care about going forward, you care about stopping and steering. So brakes and tires matter. We all have 4 wheel brakes, so set there. Get some awesome snow tires and 2WD and you will steer/stop fine in the snow. Plow up a hill through snowbanks? Maybe not.

AWD assures you always have traction, tracking means steering, therefore AWD means you retain steering in bad conditions. If you move to a snowy area the majority of vehicles have either AWD or 4WD, the few that don't NEED snow tires just to make it work.

AWD used to be questionable because of the price and fuel economy, but these days thanks to computer controls, it is close to 1 MpG, and the price has come down to within a thousand dollars of a non-AWD vehicle (in fact several manufacturers do 1-1.5K AWD upgrades).

> AWD assures you always have traction, tracking means steering, therefore AWD means you retain steering in bad conditions. If you move to a snowy area the majority of vehicles have either AWD or 4WD, the few that don't NEED snow tires just to make it work.

I have lived my entire life in areas where it snows. This is fundamentally not true.

Traction has to do with tires. Good snow tires - awesome traction. Bald summer tires - bad traction. If you need to steer around something, the tires is what matter - NOT AWD or 4WD.

The reason the majority of cars up north have AWD or 4WD is because people are sheep, and believe in marketing material over facts.

If you would like to read more about this, please check out: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/12/01/all-wheel-drive-do...

To me this sounds horribly unsafe. You are lulled into this state where you don't have to pay attention to steering UNLESS you have to pay attention to steering, and you will find this out suddenly. So if you always have to pay attention, even when the system is active, then what exactly is the point of the system in the first place? Wouldn't it be safer to always pay attention?

I guess this is an empirical question. Is it just as safe to (a) not pay attention until suddenly you have to pay attention, vs (b) pay attention all the time?

I suppose the sudden aspect of (a) is the dangerous part.

On the other hand the constant vigilance demand of (b) is also dangerous (we know people are bad at staying vigilant for long periods of time when a stimulus doesn't change much)

Does anyone know of any peer reviewed published work on this?

I was actually thinking that may be the case, but (anecdata warning!) after switching to a car with lane assist + adaptive cruise control (so similar to the described one I think), I can concentrate on the road ahead much more now. I didn't realise how tiring the "normal driving" is until now. The ability to stop glancing at the dashboard to check speed and not working that hard to turn (even comparing to assisted steering) is amazing.

You may think those things are in muscle memory, but actually they do tire you out. Even after a 1h drive, I'm much more relaxed than before - and that means I'm actually able to just look ahead and think about the road, not about what I'm doing.

unless heavy traffic on highway, this is already achievable for me with usual cruise control (I did few home trips that are 1500km far within 1 day - tiring but doable... 1 hour is a breeze in good car).

if in heavy traffic, I turn off cruise control anyway, you better focus properly.

Some references here: http://hal.pratt.duke.edu/sites/hal.pratt.duke.edu/files/u7/...

There are various other papers from the same lab.

awesome thanks

I was once in an accident caused by the driver using cruise control. My driver had his feet relaxed and off the pedals when a car swerved in front of us.. he reacted by going to hit the brakes and because his feet were not in a position where he knew the relative position of the pedals, he hit the accelerator instead of the brake. We swerved off the highway down an embankment at 75-80mph. We were all very lucky to be relatively uninjured, but to this day I refuse to touch cruise control or any other automated driving features. I don't know if modern adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance would have helped in my case, but I really, really don't trust a driver who is relaxed and not being constantly vigilant.

When driving with cruise control, I have a habit to lightly touch the brake pedal once in a while (without actually braking) to "warm up" my muscle memory for emergency situation.

I just bought the 2016 Civic Touring last week and it came with this. It certainly seems to be getting ahead of things to say it's self-driving. Your description is accurate, it's more of a helper than truly autonomous. I will say I was concerned, because there was a Car and Driver review where they seemed to indicate it had issues thinking you were drifting and trying to correct when you were fine, but I haven't had a problem. It detects the lane very well, and the cruise control works like a champ.

I am glad to see features like this coming to less expensive vehicles.

I have the 2016 Accord with Sensing and occasionally the road departure mitigation system will freak out and warn you even where there is no drifting at all. At one point on my drive the pavement goes from asphalt to concrete and the lane markings lighten, and this fools it nearly every time.

Overall, the whole system was worth it for the forward collision mitigation system alone. It can be a bit of a nanny but it can save me from rear-ending someone.

I find the lane keeping assist system to be of dubious utility. It can't completely drive the car--it doesn't like relatively mild curves on the freeway--so if it can't completely drive the car what good is it? The adaptive cruise control is nice for those situations when highway-speed cruise control is actually useful--which is to say, it's not too useful in a congested city. What would be more useful is if the thing could automatically follow the car in front of me in a traffic jam.

I hope the government requires these forward-collision mitigation systems as standard equipment in a few years. They are that useful. The rest of it? Meh.

I'll have to test it out on a different bit of highway, perhaps one of our older more weathered areas where lines are less defined to see how it really holds up.

I'm fortunate in that I usually only drive off peak hours, so cruise control is usually an option. I typically only use it on long drives, but my wife is a cruise control junkie and she loves the features on the new Honda.

I'd agree, the most useful bit seems to be the collision mitigation, but I still find the other stuff cool :) Oh, and the lane change camera is pretty awesome (though not relevant to our self-driving topic).

> lane change camera is pretty awesome

I didn't find this to be an improvement over the right side mirror. The optics of the mirror are such that there is practically no blind spot on the right at all. Cars on the right vanish from the mirror only when they are right next to my car--at that point I will see the car through the window itself when I glance over to the mirror.

It's the left side that's more problematic. Oddly the left side mirror does not have a true blind-spot mirror. There is this left part of the mirror that has different optics but it doesn't cover the whole blind spot. So there is a point around the left passenger door when the car is completely invisible in the mirror. This could have been remedied either with a true blind spot mirror on the left (I think Ford Fusions have these) or with a camera. Instead there is neither. I might just glue a $5 blind spot mirror on there to remedy something that could have been standard equipment.

Sometimes they made strange choices with this car.

I have to say that with respect to regular cruise control, I got out of the habit of using it years ago and don't remember the last time I tried it. I don't drive a lot of wide-open roads and even when I'm on rural interstates that are relatively low traffic, it's the case that I just got out of the habit.

I'm all for collision avoidance systems but, for the rest, I think I'd need to genuinely (and relatively safely) be able to take my attention off the road and do other tasks. Maybe decrease the amount of mental energy in stop and go but the big win is being able to do other things than actively drive.

What this WSJ article described definitely seems more like a Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC)[1] than true autonomous driving [2].

Note that ACC has been around for LONG time - as early as 1992. And the new Honda Civic's tech package's ACC + Lane keeping is only considered to be Level 2 Autonomous driving, whereas Tesla has achieved Level 3 autonomy [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cruise_control_syst...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car

Mercedes has had the ability to keep a safe following distance for a decade or more. The lane assist is not something I've heard of, but I stopped staring at the latest and greatest features on cars around the time that Mercedes came out with the follow feature.

Mercedes also has active lane-keeping assist functionality.

But do they have it in such a cheap car? I know that the feature existed for a long time in very expensive cars.

I don't think they have such a cheap car (not in the US anyways). But it is my understanding that they offer it in their lowest end models.

The Driver Assistance Package ($2500) on the CLA250 brings the total of the base model to ~$35K. It includes DISTRONIC PLUS (which regulates distance and speed), Blind Spot Assist, and Lane Keeping Assist. I'm not sure what that entails in the newer models. My 2013 MB seems to only alert me if I'm drifting onto the shoulder. I don't think it corrects it for me.

I have a 2014 E-class with DISTRONIC PLUS, and it turns the steering to stay in the lane. I'm assuming a current CLA has the same if it has DISTRONIC PLUS.

The shoulder drifting feature is a different feature, at least on my car, and it's not tied to whether cruise control is engaged or not.

In Germany, you can get an A-klasse with DISTRONIC PLUS (and absolutely nothing else) for $30k, but it's an almost $4k accessory, it's not standard, and if you're shopping in that segment it would be very weird to pick that option and nothing else.

So Honda's offering is actually pretty spectacular!

Lots of cars have had these features for a while, but it's really only been in the higher end models. What's interesting is that it's becoming available in cheaper cars now, and is a step towards it becoming a standard featured in all cars.

the system will disengage and tell you to steer manually

Does it make a sound like this when it disengages?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XxEFFX586k

I would guess you are correct about how they make sure your hands are on the wheel. I've done some car hacking and one of the things that surprised me was how sensitive some cars steering wheels are to pressure. It was impossible to keep it in the same position according to the car's internal electronic systems with my hands on it. This is car is 4 years old, so it's probably only gotten more sensitive.

I have a Tesla, that also requires hands on the wheel from time to time. I'd assumed it was capacitive. It hadn't occurred to me that it might be subtle movements, because the wheel is unresponsive until you make a purposeful movement, at which point it starts moving with your hands; and you can just rest your hands against it lightly to let it know they're there. But of course it could be sensing subtle forces, even if it switching modes only on larger forces.

Is there a test for whether it's capacitive? Like, does the fact that it works with gloves on mean it's not capacitive? (That's diagnostic for capacitive touch screens, but they're smaller and trying to detect finer motion and from just the fingers.)

According to this article, Tesla's system is not capacitive : http://www.wired.com/2015/10/tesla-self-driving-over-air-upd...

One interesting thing to try, still, would be to stuff a full water bottle into the gaps in the steering wheel to emulate a hand, like so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi2oIRMwmZY

This definitely works for many capacitive systems, but I think this might also work for some of the movement-based systems, since it will add extra mass/inertia to the wheel and the water sloshing around could emulate small hand movements.

I have the 2016 Honda Civic LX with Sensing. It doesn't require me to keep my hands on wheel. However, it keeps losing the lane, requiring you to steer manually. Maybe the lane markings are not clear enough here in Los Angeles.

Also, the adaptive cruise control often brakes abruptly, even making the front collision warning system go off. I also don't know if it activates the brake lights when it brakes (since traditional cruse controls don't). This means that I usually brake manually.

All those things make this feature less useful than it should be. Before I bought this car, I actually did some research on this, but I haven't found any test that compares how well these features do in practice.

> (since traditional cruse controls don't)

of course they do, where are you getting that?

traditional cruise control is just about keeping constant speed, no adaption to situation, road inclination etc. my 12 year old BMW has one, wonderful feature and keeps me still engaged with what's on the road

Traditional cruise control will most definitely hit the brakes. Set a speed and then drive down a nice grade, you'll see it in action. The oldest vehicle I've seen this in was a 1989 Dodge Caravan, you could literally watch the brake pedal move.

I was under the impression that they use engine breaking, which does not trigger the break lights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_braking

For normal (non-adaptive) cruise control there are few situations where the brakes would make sense, but one of those is a steep hill. An easy way to find out what happens if you have a decent grade nearby: set a low speed and point yourself down the hill. I commuted over a large grade for some years and all the cars I drove would brake on it. Can't speak for every system ever made, obviously.

I have a 2016 VW GTI that has the same feature set. It's cool and all but more of a safety feature if you happen to fall asleep while driving than anything else. Just hope that if you fall asleep that there is sufficient contrast between the pavement and the lane markers.

I got a mazda that does the same thing.

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