Hacker News Reader

Comment by jstsch | Hacker News Reader

The regulations are great, in theory. In practice, I've noticed that implementation of the technologies are lacking. So on paper, lane keeping will keep you on the road when distracted. In practice, it does not. You'll be beeped at a million times, though.

View on HN

I have two vehicles with lane keeping (a 2017 Chrysler and a 2025 Ford). Both of them work quite well. The system in the Chrysler will nudge you back if you drift outside of your lane, while the system in the Ford will do that plus automatically stay centered in the lane when cruise control is active.

I have driven vehicles that have lane departure warnings without lane keeping, and they're much less useful.

Maybe I drive more defensively than most but I almost never drive in the center of the lane unless I am in a ‘middle’ lane with lanes on either side. I drive with my tire riding the correct side of the solid line demarcating the shoulder, people (especially pickups hauling trailers, pro semi drivers are usually good) are really bad at staying in their lanes so I sometimes drive onto the shoulder to prevent an accident in the case of another driver lane drifting and overcorrecting.

I typically stay in the middle of the lane, but will drift to one side when I'm passing a vehicle that is wider or potentially erratic. I've never noticed lane-keeping fighting me when there's a car next to me; I wonder if they use the blind spot sensors to detect when to give some leeway in these situations.

Generally the cars with better lane warning/centering use camera or radar to see other vehicles.

We have been moving from pretty crude centering, to adaptive based on other vehicles, to intelligent enough to avoid potholes and cross lane markings deliberately (eg, passing a cyclist on an empty road).

The problem is all these options exist simultaneously, with the same marketing, and same ancap bonus points; even when the actual capability of the car varies massively.

My Tesla is quite accurate about whether I'm looking at the road or not. What car specifically had this issue?

That's the trouble with automating cars - being quite accurate is not really that great over 100k miles. On Tesla's specifically I find the "hands on wheel" attention detection a bit iffy.

For FSD, at least in the US they long dropped the hands on the wheel thing, unless the attention monitoring isn't functioning. At least the folks I know that have it, they absolutely love it.

The current docs still say issues with the camera detection results in the hands on wheel prompts https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2017_2023_model3/en_us/GU... but yes, it was nice when they removed the requirement to have the hands on the wheel even when the camera was working right.

I liked the Tesla progress & road trips but my real bar for joy is the Waymo style promise/start of delivery. There's no fallback to wait for improvement there, either it does everything it promises or it doesn't do anything!

Two Toyotas. The steering you apply, even with almost no torque, always overrides lane keeping. Super dangerous. No beeps when that happens. Whereas with my Tesla you’d have to force it out of autopilot. Or fight a bit back if the car corrects you for safety.

It varies so much by brand, too. Some brands are too aggressive and end up ping-ponging you in the lane if you let them, and then there's my new Mazda where it doesn't seem to work in any case where I want it to work, but will fight me as hard as it can if I try to take a highway exit.

lane assist is fundamentally an unsolvable problem with just a cheap camera, it's in the same category as autonomous driving, that's what these stupid legislation do not get.

Anybody who drove in a construction area with messed up / duplicated lanes can attest how this kind of software stuggles.

It seems like you are being downvoted but I've had the exact issue you mention where there is heavy over-banding on the road surface. Or where you try to move out to overtake a cyclist and it decides to correct you back into lane.

Even in perfectly normal, common situations it fails horribly. The bottom stretch of the road I live on is about 2.5 cars wide, but one side is reserved for parking (it’s terraced housing so no off-street parking). That leaves 1.5 cars of width, so if you’re driving on the side with parked cars you give way and pass on the other side when there is nothing oncoming.

Before I turned it off, my car would regularly beep frantically and try to steer me into the parked cars. Thankfully it’s a 2022 model so now I’ve turned it off, it stays off.

How are they great?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com