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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

Lane keeping assistants can be pretty bad too. I have a relative with a 2018 VW that has a lane keeping function, and it's swerved the car out of nowhere a couple of times (or at least, maybe it made a small correction which startled the driver and caused them to swerve - either way it's a human interaction nightmare).

I think it's kept in some kind of standby mode at low speeds then kicks in automatically when over a certain speed, when IT chooses to kick in and can take the driver by surprise, the car tries to move to the centre of the lane (or what it thinks is the lane).

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My VW has lane-keeping assist. In general I like it, because it had nudged me when I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have. But one failure mode is that it can detect shadows or other artifacts that it decides are lane markers. For example, at the right time of day hanging power lines will create a smooth curved shadow line on the road surface that the car will want to follow where ever they lead. It's not strong enough to yank the wheel out of my hands, but if I were briefly holding the wheel with my knee while reaching for something, it could get messy.

> I were briefly holding the wheel with my knee while reaching for something, it could get messy.

you are what?

Right? These lane keep assists in every car I've used have been very gentle nudges. People talking about how their car was forced into another lane by the LKA really make me question how firmly they were holding on to the wheel.

> hanging power lines will create a smooth curved shadow line on the road surface that the car will want to follow where ever they lead

This is some literal Looney Tunes stuff... But it's the future we live in.

> or at least, maybe it made a small correction which startled the driver and caused them to swerve

LKA is practically never strong enough itself to overpower an actual driver and force the car to swerve especially if the driver had even a reasonable grip on the wheel.

If the nudge of LKA was enough to startle the driver and have them swerve then just normal road feedback into the wheel would also cause them to startle and swerve.

Normal road feedback is predictable and has a central tendency. Who knows what the LKA will do when it does the equivalent of seeing a squirrel on an otherwise straight road.

As a big defender of ADAS in general and after experiencing active Lane Keep (not LDW) in several rental vehicles, while on holiday, I feel that they genuinely make driving on countryside roads and mountain roads more dangerous.

That's been my experience. They apparently have no "understanding" of single lane roads. ~2022 Toyota and a 2025 Ford.

Multiple times they attempted to steer me back into the oncoming vehicle because it thought I was too close to the edge. You can disable it but only for the current trip; so every time we got back in we had to go through a 2-3 minute checklist of disabling the murder settings.

> disabling the murder settings

Why is owning a modern car such a nightmare...? I suspect there's also a weird overlaid anxiety when one feels like they are "co-piloting with an unpredictable partner" rather than just driving.

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