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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

That's funny, I only ever use adaptive cruise when I'm in a lot of traffic on the highway. At slow speeds it's not going to do anything and I'm pretty much just going to follow the car in front at low speed. I use lane keeping the rest of the time and it really reduces fatigue.

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My issue in traffic is that if someone gets between me and the car in front of me, the car hits the brakes to make some room. I’ve had it slow down from 50mph, from 75. It’s dangerous, if the person behind me isn’t paying attention, they could easily hit me. If I ever have it on in traffic my finger is on the switch to turn it off incase someone merges in front of me.

Of course, I use the max follow distance, so I have time to react if something happens and the car doesn’t do its job. I know some people who use the closest distance, which I guess would solve the merge issue, but would stress me out and if something happened, I’d be screwed.

And at slow speed in traffic jams, it plays accordion. When the car in front accelerates, it has a delay; when it decelerates, it has a delay… then it slams the breaks. If there’s one thing an automated system should be good at, it’s keeping a constant distance with the car in front, “constant” with the twist that it should be proportional to the speed.

Not sure what kind of car you have, but that’s the way my wife’s car works too — aggressive braking to keep the gap. My Tesla is the only car I’ve used adaptive cruise control where it doesn’t freak out and brake when you get cut off. Instead, if the car that pulled in ahead of you is traveling at a higher speed, it just lets the gap grow naturally.

Now, of course I’ve still had it brake at shadows on the road, so it’s not perfect, but sometimes it works like I’d expect.

A VW GTI was where I had it happen a lot. I don’t have it anymore. I assume my new car works the same way, but after the VW I haven’t given it the chance.

If someone merges while accelerating, the cruise control generally handled it ok. However, most of the time people merge, then speed up. During that first part, the car freaks out and slams on the brakes, and keeps on that course of action even as the car ahead speeds up. With the lead car speeding up, and mine going 50 when the new gap is correct, it ends up growing even bigger, so I then need to catch up. It makes me look like I can’t drive, lol.

Oh, haha, this is a miscommunication. I meant stop-and-go traffic when I meant traffic haha.

I have only found one practical application for adaptive cruise control so far: when driving in tunnels where speed cameras strictly and vigorously enforce speed limits, hence 99% of the drivers behave and adaptive cruise control is safe to use.

Outside the tunnels… other drivers' erratic behaviour makes adaptive cruise not very useful or too monotonous on long stretches of state and interstate highways to the point that it lulls [me] into a sleep.

Yeah, there is a lot of variation in interpretation here. I'm farther along the spectrum still: I'm on FSD essentially 100% of the time in highway environments now because I absolutely trust the car's attentiveness and precision more than my own.

Think back on how many times you've started a lane change and aborted because there was a car there, how many times you've looked down to navigate and hit the rumble strip, how many times you've had to rely on ABS to avoid hitting the car you didn't notice stopping in front of you, etc... Not once in almost three years and 40k miles in my Model Y has it done something like this. That's not to say it's never going to, but 100%, for sure, it's better than I am.

Jesus Christ.

If _any_ of those things happen to you regularly, please do something about changing that before you kill someone.

There are two kinds of drivers: drivers who know they're fallible, and fallible drivers who don't. Maybe you're an outlier who doesn't make these mistakes, and if so I applaud your skill. But most likely you're just like the rest of us, and have the added handicap of self-censoring your mistakes as "someone else's fault". Data filtering is a hell of a drug, as it were.

I’ve had ABS activate like twice in my entire life. Agree with the person you’re responding to: if ABS activates regularly when you’re driving then you may not be a safe driver.

I think for this person FSD might actually be an improvement.

Your inappropriate mockery notwithstanding, that was exactly my point. I'm happy you agree.

Yes, I do agree. The hope is that full-self-driving systems will help people who should really not be on the road, negligent drivers, the elderly, those with impaired capacity from drugs and alcohol, etc.

ABS regularly engages if you drive anywhere icey.

It's not a skill issue if the ground friction is basically 0.

There's only one kind of bad driver: one who's convinced all their mistakes are normal reasonable mistakes that everyone makes occasionally.

I’m someone that checks my side mirror when I make a turn just to collect data on whether my tire touches the line.

So I agree with OP. If you consider mistakes like “not checking your blind spot and aborting a lane change” as a part of normal driving, I would have to say that you are not a good driver.

You don’t get to a point where you become proud of your work without keeping track of your mistakes and improving on them.

Well said. I try to be 100% attentive (spoiler: am not perfect) and rather than losing interest in “boring” driving situations I play a game of trying to guess what other drivers will do, and being very conscious of whether I am right.

It’s mostly a way to maintain alertness, but it’s also helped discover patterns. Like, on city streets, if someone pulls out in front of you unreasonably and makes you get on the brakes, odds are good they will are only going a short distance and will turn, likely necessitating braking.

But yeah, just throwing up hands and declaring that everyone probably makes the mistake is no way to improve, at anything.

Those things you listed are not "oopsie daisy" mistakes everyone makes, those are situations that arise from negligent driving.

I'm not a _good_ driver - the rumble strip one will happen to me about once a year - but I haven't had an "ABS prevented a crash" in well over a decade.

Agreed. I've been driving for 30 years and I have never hit a rumble strip I didn't expect to, or had ABS activate. That is not normal!

I think the answer for all this is one, and it's because a tire from the person ahead of me popped and he started swerving left, into my lane.

And I'm a bad driver (or an extremely careful/stressed one if you want to be charitable). All this should almost never happen.

Opinion: most of the replies to this comment are missing the bigger picture: FSD is trustworthy enough for highway WITH supervision.

I also use FSD on highways, and often on streets too. I find it’s very good when you adjust expectations. You still need to watch and be aware; but it’s absolutely less draining than driving yourself.

Excluding turns, I almost never interrupt FSD.

Turns, it’s not confident enough to go. Hoping 12 helps but I expect a few more years to fully solve. Even without turns it’s 100% worth it - I’m more attentive over the span of the drive with the car handling basics.

I don't want to criticize your driving but these are not common occurences for me (ie. the answer to most is 'never'), and I would be quite concerned if they were. Most are solved by maintaining awareness around you (including checking blind spots) and follow distance ahead of you.

This is BS. It takes a couple seconds to check a blindspot. Same with most other things you look at, navigation, radio, whatever. The rest of traffic doesn’t wait around while you are focused on that one thing.

I think his point was that the time to check the lane over is before you initiate a lane change, not after. About the only reason to initiate a lane change without pre-checking where you're going is if there's an emergency (like the incident we're discussing) and then it's questionable whether it's better to do the lane change anyway...

Let's just say I've been astoundingly impressed at the quality of drivers on this forum. Come on, everyone stomps on their brakes for unexpected stuff, or has to jump back into the lane when it wasn't as clear as you thought[1]. You just code it, like almost all drivers do, as "someone else's fault", so it doesn't get filed away in your brain as something automation can fix. But it is, and I'm telling you straight up that it does.

[1] Seriously, you see this happen around you hourly (or frankly more often) in urban traffic. You really think none of those drivers count?

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