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Comment by chairmanwow1 | Hacker News Reader

I bought my car with the express intent of getting a compatible car for Comma. My comma absolutely increased the utility of my car to me.

Been on 3 huge road trips that I wouldn’t have considered without the device. 12 hours on the road isn’t something I would do everyday, but absolutely bearable with a comma.

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If anything it sounds to me as if the comma provided a false sense of security. Drawing from experience driving 9 hours is already grueling. At hour 10, 11 or 12 would you have been able to take control during a failure of the system?

I drove 10-12h per day across Canada without cruise control let alone any drivers aid.

If you have no option, you just get it done.

I have one. It's fairly limited so you are forced to pay attention all of the time and think about whether you need to take over. You just aren't doing the menial tasks of keeping the car centered in the lane or keeping a safe following distance.

If the system does something you don't like you just grab the wheel or touch the gas/brakes (the control messages it sends are lower priority for the car than driver inputs). It's also designed to disable itself if it sees gas or brake input.

It's really best considered as an upgrade to the stock lane keeping assist and dynamic cruise control found on most cars. Compared to the stock systems it's much better behaved (my stock Toyota system will happily drive straight across multiple lane lines in certain lighting conditions and it astounds me that such a thing could be sold), but it is a long long way from Level 4.

> you are forced to pay attention all of the time and think about whether you need to take over

The same people who cram an orange in to their Tesla's steering wheel will just download a sketchy repack of the open source software that disables the attention checks.

if you override the safety precautions, aren't you inherently taking your safety and the safety of your passengers into your own hands? I don't think you can hold that against any manufacturer.

I certainly think so. I have built a nice intuition for the kinds of scenarios that the system doesn’t handle well. So it’s a pretty seamless transition where I assume control whenever a slow vehicle is merging or an aggressive driver is weaving through the lanes.

I recently rented a car and on a much shorter journey (90 minutes) I was struck by how much more tedious and frustrating it was to manually pilot the vehicle.

I think the thing that makes driving grueling is that you can mostly drive at a subconscious level. Staying in the lane and matching speed are mostly automatic, but occasionally you zone out for a second, or get absorbed into the audiobook. Then you start to drift to the edge of the lane or get a little to close to a decelerating car in front. Then there is a hard attention snap where you are forced back to focused attention of the driving task.

An L2 system does marvels for just smoothing out those peaks. It’s much less frequent that you have to intervene, so your attention can stay at a much more comfortable level and smoothly ramp back to high focus when a situation presents itself.

Comma.one ranks highest in making sure the driver is paying attention and second in "unresponsive driver" according to Consumer Reports...

I remember Hotz making a big deal about tracking the driver as much as the road. Which is something Tesla is behind on.

Which car and what did you drive before? And can you quantify how much benefit you see over adaptive cruise / lane assist / etc that is standard on many cars these days?

I agree with your sentiment, just unsure what your point of reference is and how much impact the fancy AI actually has. My car (2017 model) has the features I mentioned from the factory and is great on long trips too.

This is a good video somebody did to compare the Toyota's stock system (latest one known as tss 2.0) with Comma Openpilot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5-inxH92wM

Yeah the Toyota 2.0 system is pretty lousy. I rented a 2019 RAV4 Hybrid for a road trip from the Bay Area to San Diego. Lane keep assist didn’t work well, even in broad daylight. One of the blind spot monitors was broken (missed a semi that passed us), which was a shocking failure. The adaptive cruise control was good though.

I didn’t own a car before ;) I rode a bicycle and took the train. Although I would rent cars when driving up to Tahoe or Yosemite.

I would say that the lane-keep systems are pretty conservative. I tend to think of it that those systems help you steer while comma will do it for you.

There’s a huge difference between hands and feet off the steering wheel/pedals and needing to guide it every step of the way.

In particular, I think I tried a VW and a Ford’s lane assist. They would lessen the torque for turning the wheel, but wouldn’t actually make a turn by itself, which has marginal value, but significantly less.

Since you've done the research, what car works best with it? What are you driving?

Toyota Corolla 2020 (got steering sensor with decent torque and the ability to do stop and go)

I'm still unclear as to the benefit given that you're required to attend to the road and it detects distracted people in the driver's seat?

do you find benefit in dynamic cruise control in slow moving traffic. Now add the lane centering logic and you dont have to apply a lot of torque on the wheel either, because the system does adjustments for you.

So the benefit is strictly in slow-moving traffic?

And it's never occurred to me that steering wheel torque is an issue. And so many of these processes -- lane centering, not bumping into the car ahead of me -- are subconscious for me at this point, but I've been driving for decades.

May I ask how good is the technology that notices when someone is distracted and forces them to attend to the road?

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