Lane Keep Assist question/observations

When I was a kid, in the days before widespread use of circuit breakers, a quick solution to a blown fuse was to put a penny behind it, after which you could sometimes watch your house burn down. So, the price of stupidity has gone up by 17,900%.

 

The headline writer misunderstood the announcement. Tesla has for the last year+ sold incremental add-ons for "enhanced" and "full" self-driving features. Until now the full self-driving option hasn't actually done anything extra. The announcement is that as of the next release it will start to be differentiated from the lower "enhanced" version, as originally envisioned.

In other words, Full Self-Driving is an aspirational phrase, not a reality.

And yes, Teslas do change lanes when there's room to do so, but only in response to the driver activating the turn signal.

 

While I wish Tesla had not labeled its suite of driver assist features "Autopilot", because the average person doesn't understand that an airplane's pilot is expected to "keep watching the skies" even when the autopilot is on... At the same time, I think you exaggerate when you say that drivers are supposed to keep their hands on the wheel at all times when AutoSteer is activated.

Here is the actual warning screen as displayed in a Tesla car:

 

That's a very good article, thanks! A quote:

Sam Abuelsamid, an industry analyst at Navigant and former automotive engineer, tells Ars [Technica] that it's "pretty much universal" that "vehicles are programmed to ignore stationary objects at higher speeds."​

All too many people, even here on InsideEVs, express disbelief when those of us in the know state this fact. Oh, surely not? Surely automatic braking systems, and semi-self-driving systems such as Cadillac Super Cruise and Tesla Autopilot, are not designed and built to simply ignore stationary objects in the lane the car is traveling in?

Yes, they are! That is one of many reasons why the driver should always be alert, always keep watching the road, and always be ready to grab the wheel at any moment. Quite contrary to many videos uploaded to YouTube, which show the driver of such a car ignoring the road to talk to the person in the passenger seat, or even in some cases turned around and talking to the camera held by someone in the back seat!

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Entirely correct.

That, too. In the current state of development, Autopilot+AutoSteer will never initiate a lane change on its own, not even to avoid an accident. Or at least, it's not supposed to change lanes without being told to by the driver!

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All that said, I feel much more comfortable and relaxed driving the Clarity with ACC and LKAS on than driving a Tesla with Autopilot. Once the novelty has worn off, the need to be constantly on the alert for those unhandled edge cases is, for me, much more stressful than just driving myself, with assistance.

Make me a 2019 Clarity with the right-turn camera duplicated on the left, and a god's-eye view display for parking, and that's all the self-driving I need until the day comes when I can merge onto the highway, engage the self-drive, and take a nap until the car wakes me a few minutes before my exit.

 

Same sentiment here.
I have not experienced any auto-pilot type features but most of us know human nature. Sitting there and passively keeping alert is very difficult.

Generally, in the end they don't make things safer. For example, ABS while great in part just results in people following closer on the highway because they have a certain amount of risk they are willing to accept.

When the cars can take it over 100% and the manufacturer says I can watch a movie while driving then I think I will turn them all on. Until then there are only a few that I see a point in.

 

If the point of the warning is to encourage safe (hands-on) driving, then the warning at seemingly random intervals is exactly right, from a human factors engineering point of view. This is what we psychologists call a variable-interval schedule of reinforcement, which generally produces high, steady rates of the desired behavior.

 

How are they keeping a person's attention on the road?
As it is people even micro-sleep while in full control of a vehicle (I remember a train conductor study). What was it 15 seconds at a time?
Not to mention just plain spacing out and paying attention to other things.
Some guy just last weekend was on a clip crashing his car into a toll booth median at full speed.

Yes, the Honda safety systems still sound like a good thing over all to me except for that one where the production line is not making basic trim for long periods and keeping me out of a car, I am a safe guy, really.