Hacker News Reader

Comment by ta1243 | Hacker News Reader

My car randomly braked today because it thought a car on a side road was pulling out. Not just sound the alarm but actually apply the brakes. Fortunately I didn't have a tailgater behind me.

I disable the "land assist" every time (which often tries to steer me into wildlife or other cars and was clearly not built for use on a single track country roads with hedges and random verges), but this was the first time in 3 years that the "front assist" caused problems.

If that's "high quality", I dread to think what low quality would be.

View on HN

This happened to be on a highway when driving my friends car with all these assisted driving "features" while in cruise control. I was going up a small hill and for whatever reason there was a car stopped right at the top that I couldn't see. So the car slammed the breaks while I was in the middle of swerving out of the way. Which caused me to swerve more than I had intended. After I regained control it removed the breaks and attempted to return to the 80mph I was at previously which caused more problems because I wasn't ready for that.

I am now of the opinion that a car should never under any circumstance drive for you. If a car has cruise control it should cruise control you into a wall. That I can at least anticipate.

Yes, YES! Exactly! I'm hanging onto a couple older cars now because the new stuff is terrible!

This happened to me a couple of years ago where the car I was driving decided that one of those water-filled tanks ahead of a barrier on a road under construction was in front of the car just because the road was curving hard to the right. It was very scary. It almost caused an accident by itself. I don't remember how the brake assist cleared, but the fact that there's nothing one can do to make the computer not break is very scary.

That happens decently often. This is the reality for all systems aside from braking system in trucks perhaps, which are more sophisticated.

The decision to do an emergency break is the same problem fully self-driving cars need. You need to interpret sensory input and have a model of the environment.

Ironically some genius made these systems mandatory despite them being a safety concern. Granted, they tend to work if someone really falls asleep behind the wheel.

Never had this happen in an EU-spec 2020 Audi A4.

This subthread is about ISO standards. The implementation quality of the new safety systems varies wildly.

On one of our cars, it is fine. On the other, it’s so bad they should have to buyback the last N years of vehicles. I hear the same high-variance story from friends.

The standards for this stuff are completely inadequate.

Same thing happened to my wife, while driving at about 110km/h…luckily no one was behind her.

Braking at any point is safe with a competent driver behind. There's a reason we know our stopping distances and don't follow excessively closely.

Alas half of drivers are worse than average.

I'm one of them. Yet I still haven't had a situation where "lane assist" or "front assist" has actually been a good thing.

That is unrealistic. If you expect the brake perhaps but the most competent thing to do in case of an emergency brake is doing nothing.

Not on a hard curve with oncoming traffic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com