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Comment by seec | Hacker News Reader

Same. Even cruise control is kind of useless because people in front of you don't necessarily use it and are very inconsistent in their speed. So you end up constantly having to engage/disengage, rendering the whole thing moot.

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.

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To your first point, that's what adaptive cruise control does. It will slow you down to maintain a gap with the car in front of you.

Ah yes, I never used that. My car isn't very recent (about 10 years old now), and I drive very little (about 2-3k per year; I take the train to go anywhere far) because I hate it. But the adaptive part would make it much more useful indeed.

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...

ACC generally has a 3-4 second time interval that it permits between you and the car in front of you. I live in SoCal, so a lot of my driving is on very aggressive routes. The 4-second gap is mechanically safe but it's practically unusable because it creates a void large enough to invite other cars to lane change in front of me. So when that car merges in, the ACC detects a violation of the safe braking distance and decelerates to reestablish the gap. I call it the "cut me off" loop when we're on trips.

And before anyone suggests that I start tinkering around with the settings, I have adjusted it and the damned thing just resets itself constantly.

The beauty of ACC is it lets your disengage mentally. You can be aggro if you want to with it on, but I found it's just not emotionally worth it to get mad at being cut off anymore in a car with ACC. ACC just handles going forwards and I'm not having to touch gas nor brake. If I'm not touching either, I don't have to panic react to getting cut-off, just make sure the ACC is handling it, and if that's all I need to check, vs slam on the brakes, then eh.

The base 2020 Forester has adaptive cruise control.

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