Hacker News Reader

Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

"And within a few minutes we got freaked out with what seem to us as unpredictable action and we turned it off."

On the one hand, I'm affected by the FUD and will not buy a Tesla, and perhaps also will have schadenfreude to the extent their CEO has misfortunes.

On the other hand, to be fair, other driver assistance features are creating problems too. I think it was Subaru I was just reading about having serious problems (and a recall) where automatic braking triggers inappropriately and may cause an accident.

People have incredible faith in software and technology, and that's fine and all, but I wonder what people like that hang around HN for.

View on HN

I have a Subaru with some sort of "Eye Sight" feature. It is quite handy in maintaining a constant distance from a car in front of you in moderate traffic - but you have to always be ready for someone to cut you off. It tracks the lane markers and rumbles the steering wheel. If a car stops short ahead of you, it beeps and flashes an indicator - I'm usually on the ball enough to hit the brakes myself though, so I don't know if its automatically braking or not.

That being said, there is a place on my commute where going around a curve in one particular spot (southbound highway 17 in Santa Cruz, before the Glenwood Cutoff if anyone is playing at home) where 9 times out of 10 the car thiunks thinks I'm about to drive into a wall, sounds the alarm, and then regains its senses.

So I haven't had it fail in a harmful way but I also don't think I'd ever give it enough rope to hang me with.

I also own a Subaru. The assistance is very unwelcome for the crash detection at times. Living in Minnesota the exhaust from a car in front of you can set it off.

This can happen on start off of a green light and can completely decelerate the Subaru. The eyesight detects the exhaust as obstacle the car behind you is now at a loss why you are now immediately breaking off the green light. I’m not a fan at all and eye sight.

Additionally, you have to turn off the backup sensor to leave my drive way or it will slam on the brakes as it detects flowers that may be leaning into the drive way.

Car smarts don’t seem all that smart. I get a kid could be saved here, but driving a car crying wolf all the time leaves a consumer very frustrated. Dealership has been zero help in both regards.

The Subaru doesn’t have a forward radar does it? I heard it uses two optical camera instead. I bet smoke/water vapor can trip that up...

Our Mazda gets tripped up when adaptive cruise is engaged and someone pulls into the turn lane to make a left. It also can sometimes get “spooked” on the interstate when going on turns and trucks are in adjacent lanes.

Hasn’t freaked out with collision warnings though. Every time it has it was totally justified.

My Mazda has the same issue with cars in front taking exits. I’ve also had it brake unexpectedly on the highway on Rt 95 in RI. I was coming over the crest of a small hill and in front was a stone overpass. The angle of the radar was still elevated so it thought that I was headed into a stone wall. Except the road dips down well before the overpass so in reality that isn’t a possibility.

The warning lights and alarm went off and then the car slammed on the brakes. Thankfully no one was behind me.

Subaru EyeSight uses two stereoscopic video cameras only: no radar, lidar, or ultrasonics. It was engineered to achieve the maximum possible safety improvement at minimum cost. And it basically succeeded at that, but it's very limited. Can only sense straight ahead, doesn't work at all in fog or heavy precipitation, etc.

What year is your Subaru? My understanding was that early versions of the eyesight system were pretty bad, but they fixed a lot of the kinks in recent versions. It would be disappointing to learn that wasn’t the case...

2018 Outback. Which is fairly new’ish.

I don't like the idea of automatic braking, but arguably plenty of people had irrational fears about seat belts and air bags (although the fears about air bags seem to be coming back)...so I will seriously consider the new safety features once my car insurance offers a significant discount for them.

Good ones only engage when you don’t act fast enough. They’ll also press the brake pedal harder if it thinks you aren’t pressing hard enough fast enough.

Ours only engages when it is truly justified. It has yet to flip its shit incorrectly. It’s adaptive cruise control on the other hand will sometimes freak out about cars in adjacent lanes and slow down more than it should.

Our Volvo V40 saved our butt once on the highway. Late at night, cars piling up all of a sudden in front of us. The car slammed the brakes and stopped us a few meters away from the car in front :-)

I also have a V40 and have also had an experience exactly like that on a motorway - bright red lights flashed at the bottom of the windscreen along to a warning sound and the autonomous braking kicked in and stopped me from hitting the car in front. Excellent system.

When I was a kid - this was quite a few years ago - I had some older relatives who refused to wear a seat belt. Being somewhat of a brat, I asked them why. They answered like this:

"If I get in a wreck, I don't want to be trapped in the car. I want to be thrown clear!"

This might be just me, but I don't think it's bratty to question truly idiotic behavior.

I think it's obnoxious to call people "truly idiotic" if you would not apply the phrase to everyone who takes "unnecessary" risks. I am conditioned from childhood to wear a seatbelt in a car, but I also have owned a motorcycle in the past, and currently own a pre-airbag car (which I assume also lacks more subtle features like modern crumple zones and high strength steel, etc.). What makes one risk reasonable and another not?

I like Eyesight. It's pretty cool and I like the emergency braking feature. The warning triggers before the emergency brake quite often spuriously but it's nice. I like it.

I think the difference between me and the rest of these guys is that I see it as just an assistive technology and they're trying not to drive. I still have my eyes on the road and everything. It's just there to help, just like I still use my mirrors even when I have the blind-spot detector active. And it does a good job, especially since I can override the adaptive cruise and lane assist at any time pretty easily.

I own a 2019 Forrester with EyeSight. While I dont hate it, and I like the adaptive cruise, I'm curious..

How exactly do you easily override the crash detection logic? I've had it slam on the brakes spuriously due to steam from manhole vents, and short of disabling the feature (which cant be done in a way that sticks between starts) I dont know how I would avoid this behavior, particularly easily.

Read the manual. You should be able to explicitly turn these off for car wash, etc. They’ll be on again the next time you start.

Oh sorry, I meant that part to refer to the lane detection and adaptive cruise braking. Let me clarify.

I haven't had a fake brake yet and I've driven over quite a bit of steam myself so I guess I got lucky.

My Acura’s collision alarm always beeps before coming out of the I90 bridge tunnel on the way to Seattle. It’s not like I’m relying on auto breaking to break or anything, and it’s never actually done anything beyond warn spuriously.

Subaru EyeSight will do automatic braking under limited circumstances. It only works to reduce the risk or severity of forward collisions when the cameras can see clearly. Overall it's better than nothing and worth the minor extra cost.

I remember an engineering class at uni in the early 90's discussing how cruise control worked, and was borderline horrified at the childish simplicity of the design. In all this time, I've probably used it 1/2 dozen times, because my trust level is very low.

Just the other day I was a passenger in a Peugot and it was raining very heavily. Cruise control automatically disabled when one of the tyres suddenly bogged down due to heavy water on the road causing the car to lurch.

Until these systems look at and analyse the road and traffic like we do, I see little hope in an automated system that wasn't deadly by design. For me the number 1 litmus test is to read the slope of the road: if about to go uphill- more gas required, about to hit a crest- back off and maybe allow engine braking.

It's been almost 30 years, you might want to revisit that decision.

Sometimes simple designs are good. Older cruise control designs are quite primitive but very effective. Nothing but a simple feedback loop. Car not fast enough? More gas. Too fast? Less gas. The smarter ones (probably ones with electronic transmissions) would even downshift to keep under the preset speed.

I bet the earliest ones were all mechanical too.

Of all the features in a vehicle, I don’t think you need to worry about “standard” cruise control.

Sorry but using cruise control in heavy rain is just simply a bad idea. It's supposed to be used when conditions are ideal, not when they as bad as can be. That is human error, in my opinion.

In my driver’s education course back in the early 2000s, they explicitly told us that Cruise Control can dangerously malfunction in rain and should only be used on dry roads.

How is it any more idiotic than maintaining that speed manually?

I'm struggling to think of any combination of hardware/software that isn't asinine on first glance (e.g. feed the cruise control off only the rear wheel speed sensors on a FWD vehicle) where cruise control would be any different than a driver manually holding the same speed by putting their foot on the gas.

I don’t think a normal human would try to maintain an unsafe speed going uphill in heavy rain.

> other driver assistance features are creating problems too. I think it was Subaru I was just reading about having serious problems (and a recall) where automatic braking triggers inappropriately and may cause an accident.

I had a late model C-class Mercedes for a bit and got rid of it for that exact reason. It auto braked twice in conditions that did not warrant it at all (and hard too), the first time causing the car to come very close to skidding into the support posts of a cantilevered bridge, the second time because of a traffic sign in a turn that apparently gave enough of a return to trigger e-braking. Very bad software. According to the company that sold me the car everything was as it should be.

There is no current recall for Subaru EyeSight. Perhaps you're thinking of a different manufacturer?

Subaru did have a recall several years ago due to an electrical problem which could prevent automatic braking (not trigger inappropriately).

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2015/06/subaru-reca...

You kind of validate the other poster's point that it should be called "driving assistance" like the other half-baked solutions and not "autopilot".

I refuse to use Toyota's for the same reason. On I-95 in northern Virginia, people drive slow in the middle and left lanes all the time, so people are always weaving in and out of lanes trying to get around. This means you get cut off a lot. And every time someone cut in front, the truck would slam on the brakes well before it was necessary.

I've driven Toyota's all my life and never once been in a vehicle that does anything automatic beyond turning on the lights when it gets dark.

Maybe you just need to avoid the Toyota model you bought.

Every single new Toyota from 2017 on has adaptive cruise control and emergency braking assistance. You can disable the EBA and use reg cruise control but it’s all on by default.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com