People don’t understand how to use driver-assisted systems safely | Hacker News Reader

People don’t understand how to use driver-assisted systems safely

thenextweb.com

8 pointsalbertom946 comments

Unfortunately the marketing has gotten ahead of the actual engineering - the features can be useful but it does take an adjustment period to learn its limitations.

I have Toyota Safety Sense 2.5 on a 2021 Camry:

Pre Collision system: pretty good, it did help once when a car suddenly pulled in front of me and rapidly slowed down. Pretty good at detecting pedestrians when backing up. A good safety net, but you should never rely on it.

Dynamic cruise control: pretty good, but you need to take control if traffic is totally stopped or a car suddenly pulls in our out in front of you.

Lane departure / lane tracing assist: almost useless - too many faded lanes and complicated patterns where I live.

Road sight assist: accurate but mostly useless

Blind spot detection: a good first pass, but you still need to look. It can miss motorcycles or bicycles on a slower road. As the article mentioned, it can also miss if something is about to go into your blind spot.

By far the most useful newer feature is the 360 view camera - it makes parking super easy.

> Dynamic cruise control

My favorite feature. Of course you need to focus on the road, bit not having to check my speedometer and not having to constantly adjust it while doing long stretches of driving is nice.

I feel very unsafe with my 2018 Honda Accord's driver assist features. I turn them all off (at least the ones I am able to). The worst is that the lane assist feature tries to take every highway exit automatically by following right-side white lines. The steering wheel produces light physical resistance that I have to fight off to keep the car in the lane.

That, but also: it's genuinely hard to focus on something where your focus is redundant 99.9% of the time. This is actually something I admire in HGV drivers: they can sit on a motorway, constant speed, same lane, for hours, but react immediately to a danger (yeah I know they have accidents too, but on the whole it seems true).

We recently got a new car with various assistance features : adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring, lane keeping asisist, reverse camera etc etc. The bloody thing beeps warnings at you for so many different things I'm starting to wonder if I'd be better turning them off. About nine out of ten are alerting me to things I already know ("yes, I know there's a car alongside me. No, I'm not going to drive straight into that wall") and the one out of ten is probably just alerting me to something I'd have seen myself a fraction of a second later. They're some cool gadgets to have available but they really don't have the mind-machine interface that'd make them really indispensable.

Adaptive Cruise Control is wonderful - I recently did a long-distance drive across Europe (~1000KM), and I swear I went through 100KM of roadworks. Adaptive Cruise Control would have been amazing for that (plus the other traffic jams caused by accidents/etc).

I have seen a good implementation of blind spot monitoring, in a VW, where it was just a simple light on the appropriate side mirror. Unobtrusive, but obvious enough that you're unlikely to miss it.

The most recent car I drove (a Ford Mondeo, I think? It was a rental) had a number of those but I never really noticed them. The only time it beeped at me was when it thought I wasn't braking hard enough to avoid ramming the car in front (oh, and the proximity alert).

The reverse camera and related sensors were really useful because (a) I don't drive an awful lot, renting a car maybe once a year, and (b) because I only rent cars, I don't know them well enough to know if I'm gonna get through a gap or turn a tight corner, so having something that beeps at me to say I'm close to a wall is handy.

If I was driving the same car every day, some of these features would probably be a lot less relevant.

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