My only complaint is that there's an over-eager PID loop with lane keeping. If I want to pass a transport truck and want to kind of edge to the left of my lane when doing so, it will keep trying to compensate, which I can feel in the wheel, so I compensate for as well. And if I let go of the wheel and let it win, it suddenly flings me towards the right side of the lane.
I suspect this is because it isn't programmed to think that I'm making adjustments, it probably just thinks there's some weirdness in the vehicle dynamics/road characteristics that requires extra compensation.
But there was one thing that was quite bad, similar to yours. While passing a semi I pulled it to the left side and it actually yanked us right so hard and then over-corrected once again. Super scary moment, the only issue of the whole trip, but basically never passed with it on again.
Should also be noted that i never take my hands of the wheel. And the volvo is quite fast at beeping at me if it detects that i dont hang onto the wheel.
It's essentially that Subaru's lane system actually has two levels: it has lane keeping where it's just trying to keep you inside the lines, and then on top of that it also has lane centering which is pretty much what it says.
Just a note for you or anyone reading who has a recent Subaru and doesn't know already: if you find the centering really bothersome, you should be able to be able to go into the settings on the instrument cluster display (up/down arrows at the lower left behind the wheel, toggle it until you get to the "hold for settings" option), find the Eyesight settings, and turn off lane centering. It will still try to keep you inside the lane markers but won't try to park you right in the center of the lane. In that mode, it's more like the Honda Sensing system I had on my 2016 Civic.
I go back and forth a bit on it but mostly keep it in lane centering mode now - I've gotten used to how it positions the car in the lane, and it lets me focus more on what's going on around me than micromanaging lane position and such.
Same with Hyundai except they call them "Lane Keeping Assist" (LKA) and "Lane Following Assist" (LFA) and I have trouble remembering which one centers you and which one just keeps you from leaving the lane.
To me just based on the names I'd have expected keeping to be the one that actively positions you (it keeps you centered) and following to the one that just reacts when you are going to depart the lane (it keeps you following the lane).
Mostly now I just remember that the one that comes on automatically any time I'm going 40+ mph is the reactive one, and the one that I have to explicitly turn on is the centering one (although both come on automatically on certain highways based on data from the navigation system).
lane centering is a bit too annoying for me, i need to keep my hands on the wheels anyway.
Alignments off. Not as bad as it used to be to get it done.
I drive an old beater from 2001, but... I really don't think I understand why people want these in-between not-quite-autopilot features? To me it's like, it would be one thing if you could completely turn your brain off, or look at your phone, or rest. But since you can't, it seems like this stuff makes it more difficult to pay the appropriate amount of attention? For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
Cruise control with minimum distance helps me keep a sound distance even as other cars keep packing up and reducing distances on a busy highway. My previous car (Mercedes) was great at detecting if a new car coming in front of me was accelerating, if so it didn't adjust the distance as aggressively. Much better behavior than my current Kia.
Auto-break features are sweet as they react really fast. If that can avoid deploying an airbag in my face, I'm all for it.
I agree it's a lot like managing, with six buttons just to do the above, but from a bottom-up approach, each feature has value in its own right.
> For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
Where do you draw the line? Would you prefer not having a steering and brake servo? Would you prefer sticking out your arms instead of having flashing lights? Would you prefer feeling every bump in the road to having suspension?
To me these systems just feel like natural evolution of the car concept, something that's been going on for 120 years. What Tesla failed at was putting their heads in the clouds and hoping something awesome would eventually pop out the other end. While the established car makers did incremental improvements.
A car shouldn't "keep the turn radius", they normally drive straight by default. The forces acting on the wheels do that automatically.
It doesn't seem like a wrong thing, to me.
> Where do you draw the line?
I think the line is quite obvious between the physical comfort features and the mentally disengaging features.
Based on what you're saying, it seems the divide arises from some drivers classifying these features as physical comfort, and some as mentally disengaging.
I think something like autopilot could be implemented at the infrastructure level (sensors and emitters along the road), but people wouldn't like that because it would mean being unable to set your speed or overtake. The car exists for "freedom," but it is really an inefficient mode of transportation from both a time-use and energy-use perspective.
What we really need is a mix between rail/train and car/road.
However, something that is extremely annoying in France is that speed limits tend to change very often and abruptly. I just think that trying to solve the problem solely at the car level is always going to have too many limitations...
And before anyone suggests that I start tinkering around with the settings, I have adjusted it and the damned thing just resets itself constantly.
I don't want 'nap in the backseat while it drives me places', I want this. A bit of a personality keeping me on track and tidy. I'll keep my hands on the wheel but yeah, my attention is spared to watch for idiots, and I think that's good.
Maybe I just need more time with it but, my toyota had adaptive cruise and slammed on the brakes one time and I did not like it. On a one lane highway the car a decent ways in front of me slowed down and started moving into the shoulder to take a right turn into a driveway. As i came up on him he was almost all the way over, just his driver side wheels on the line. I moved to the far side of the lane with plenty of room to clear without slowing down and my toyota slammed on the brakes going from 65 to like 40 and it scared the shit out of me. It was a greater level of surprise and fear than I’d experienced in probably the last 20k miles of driving and was completely avoidable had I been using dumb cruise control.
Driving my mom’s Honda insight with lane assist also made me nervous when I would be near the edge of a lane on purpose and it would move the wheel on its own.
I’m not opposed to fully automated driving, but what I don’t want is to be in a situation where I need to remain alert and responsible for managing a system that does the driving. I’d rather just do the driving myself. I’ve driven for almost 20 years now, some of that professionally, and it’s second nature at this point and doesn’t require active thought outside navigating new routes and finding parking. Managing the system requires more effort for me.
I now drive a standard 33 year old truck and it’s bliss. No software updates, no bs, just a machine that takes my inputs and gets me from A to B. That said, without airbags, crumple zones and abs I’d have to get something more modern if there were children in the picture.
I have a '22 Outback. My Dad has a Tesla of similar vintage. I have to pay about as much attention for FSD as I do with the Subaru, the difference being the Subaru is more predictable.
Can't wait for Waymo to start chopping into the top end of the market.
Yep. My workaround is basically hanging back or just being prepared to gas it a bit so it doesn't freak out.
It's absolutely true that the rest of the industry is rolling out new features. But people are fooling themselves if they genuinely think it's catching up. Tesla is way, way ahead here among consumer auto vendors, and frankly at parity with Waymo in the autonomy space.
They've also made an inexplicably poor pricing decision in this case that is worth talking about. But no, your Subaru isn't a meaningful competitor.
Tesla is a car company. Every car company is a competitor to Tesla.
As a legacy EV manufacturer, Tesla is struggling to compete in the current car market. Tesla's sales have declined for the last two years.
It's why they're having to squeeze fewer customers for more revenue.
It's just a stunt. They took a machete to the feature set to find Just One Thing that would meet the requirements. All it does is use radar to follow another car on a selection of fixed, geofenced limited access highways. It can't handle the leader changing lanes, or going too fast (won't even get to the speed limit). It won't navigate, it won't change lanes. It can't even operate on an open road.
But it's "L3V31 THr333", so otherwise rational nerds get to yell about it on the internet. No one actually shows this thing off in their cars, it's not useful for real driving. FSD drives me around literally every day.
Waymos have been driving around autonomously for years; meanwhile Tesla taxis have a human in the car ready to activate a kill switch at all times. Therefore, your statement is objectively false.
EDIT: Oops, this isn't quite correct anymore — as of two days ago, in a geofenced area of Austin, Tesla has moved the safety person to a follower car: https://xcancel.com/JoeTegtmeyer/status/2014410572226322794#....
FWIW, your logic works better the other way around anyway: if the system didn't work, there would be easily-accessible proof to that effect showing the resulting hilarity as the operator needed to step in. There isn't.
And... of course there isn't. Because FSD is real and works and it drives a ton of us around every day. Is it possible that there are failure modes? Of course. Thus the safety personnel. But the bar of "if they believed it worked" was crossed years ago. Yes, it works. Duh. Go to a dealer and get a test drive if you don't believe people on the internet.
Waymos are autonomous vehicles, Tesla has some vehicles which may operate autonomously in certain circumstances. There's a big difference.
I know it's upsetting to think that someone you hate has a good product, but... they do. Arguing on the internet isn't rolling back the launch.
This has nothing to do with Elon musk. From a purely technical standpoint, no - Tesla DOES NOT have autonomous vehicles to the level of their competitors. It's not a matter of opinion.
Waymo doesn't have one or more operators dedicated to each vehicle for the entire time it is on the road. That is massively different. The latest disengagement data for FSD 14 shows that Tesla is still behind where Waymo was more than a decade ago.
The point is that it now only does that if you subscribe. If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area
It's... a car. You already pay a monthly fee. Probably several.
I get the marketing angle here, that this is a bad look and will drive away customers.
I was responding to the attempt upthread (which you just repeated) to conflate it with a technical argument ("better feature set"). The feature set is not worse because it costs money. FSD is in fact market leading.
Eh? Insurance? Registration? Not a fee but ok, ongoing cost. That doesn’t justify more ongoing costs.
> FSD is in fact market leading.
The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.
It makes the idea of a putative consumer who refuses to pay ongoing costs for their car a little silly though. Argue about whether the product value is worth the cost, not from a position of "people won't pay any more for their already extremely expensive vehicles".
> The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.
The fee under discussion is literally the cost of purchasing an FSD subscription.
Funny, I totally read this intro the opposite way of what you went on to argue.