I will gladly take a system that can drive itself confidently under 40mph in city, and use basic lane assist (and maybe lane changes and exit ramps like in Teslas) for highways. Cant wait!
I will gladly take a system that can drive itself confidently under 40mph in city, and use basic lane assist (and maybe lane changes and exit ramps like in Teslas) for highways. Cant wait!
What this article fails to mention, but other articles on this system mentioned in the past, is that this system can be enabled only on designsted highway streteches. So no city driving.
Here: https://group.mercedes-benz.com/documents/innovation/other/2..., page 18, Operational Design Domain.
Ten seconds is an eternity, so if it sees the tiniest possibility ahead that things will get complicated, it will have to be conservative and give the ten second warning. And when it does get into heavy traffic, it will be disabled.
Because it will be disabling itself a lot (or super annoying if it's giving false alarms) it will either be not in use except on very sparse roadways, or it won't even matter because it will be completely turned off by the driver.
Bottom line, it's a marketing gimmick.
The alternative is a system that goes into the thick of traffic, still active, still helping, still adding an additional level of safety over and above what the driver maintains, but since the system is going into the thick of traffic in an enabled state, actively engaged, and things are dicey, the human still needs to be involved as an active participant in oversight. Ready to take over at a moment's notice. Not ten seconds from now. In this approach, the safety benefits are real, not just marketing. But the human needs to step up and stay responsible and own the shit that happens.
Unless Tesla assumes liability for their systems while you can legaly play on your phone, they are far behind.
from the video:
> but once we hit some traffic we go under 40 miles an hour we'll be able to engage it but there are some other caveats: you have to be on a highway, the weather has to be nice, it can't be raining, it can't be freezing, and you can't change lanes; you have to stay in your lane while drive pilot is enabled
Hence the need for geofencing to the easiest situations where assuming liability means assuming nearly 0 liability. I really hope it progresses but we'll see in 3-5 years.