Comment by AlexandrB 3 days ago
Honestly, I don't like this trend. Some of these features - like lane keeping - encourage/enable distracted driving. Meanwhile the necessary sensors make cars so expensive to repair that they're becoming a disposable good. As my driving instructor says: If you need a lane keeping system to keep your car in a lane, you shouldn't be behind the wheel.
Like many (many) things, it is all about the implementation - not all lane keeping assist thinks it knows better than the driver.
The problem is knowing which lane keeping assist systems are good and which are not. Every dealer just treats it as a 'checkbox' item and implementations vary by model and year.
Had a Kia loaner a few years back that to my surprise tried to actively kill me by repeatedly steering into oncoming traffic on a provincial road. I really prefer steering myself to last-second correcting a temperamental computer.
> The problem is knowing which lane keeping assist systems are good and which are not. Every dealer just treats it as a 'checkbox' item and implementations vary by model and year.
Yep, I agree.
I used to travel to my parent's home 300km away once a month, and changing from a 2010 no-assist car to a Tesla Model 3 with AP (not FSD) back in 2019 was a game changer. I used to drive there on a Friday evening after work, and I basically collapsed into bed when I got there. With AP I was still tired of course, but also still functioning and way more alert. In my experience Tesla's AP UX is very good: chime when engaging, chime when disengaging, you don't need to look at the screen to know the state you're in, and if you touch controls it lets you know (via chime) and deactivates.
One of the most horrible UXes for me has been on a new Hyundai i10 with the basic lane assist (and I know it's very similar on a new VW Golf that my cousin is leasing):
- there's no chimes, you're forced to look at the screen at the center of the dashboard
- said display is 100x400 (or sth similar) 16-color pixel screen in the center of the dashboard
- out of said display, you need to look in the very corner for an icon of 10x10 pixels that can be yellow, green or white (which under low backlight/high contrast conditions can be tough to decipher)
- lane-keep is on by default at every car start, and tends to butt in on twisty roads (very common where I live), so half-way through a turn you'll feel the steering wheel literally lose force-feedback, while you're still applying force, and swearing ensues
- someone thought that constantly reminding people of the speed limits was a good idea, so the car will scream incessantly at you for being 50.1 over 50
- but will happily let you change lanes and re-engage auto-steer automatically (you need to manually enable this) while doing 120km/h on the highway without any hint that it's re-engaging automatically
- the speed warning is yet another setting that you can turn off at runtime, but you can't persist properly
- auto-steer, after is manually engaged, will stay happily engaged even after you leave they highway and are at very low speeds, and will try to correct you when doing roundabouts
I think the Tesla UX is way better there, and I think regulatory bodies should start preventing things like the i10 assist to be sold to customers, because they're actively dangerous. I've literally had minor heart attacks due to the lane-keep butting in on twisty roads - I thought the front tires were slipping for some reason.
I was driving until not long ago a VW with all those systems and, while less pleasant than the current Audi, I never met any of those inconveniences you met. Yes I know sample size, but... So, lane assist had zero visuals involved - activated or not activated, and giving your wheel a soft bump in that direction (it never tried hard turns, for better or for worse). The downside is that construction sites with colorful lines would indeed confuse it, so you'd either press the disable button, or keep your hands on the wheel (wife complained about it, but for me it was acceptable). The Audi handles construction sites perfectly, so far (soon a year). Speed limits meant on both cars only a visual some place, so you could ignore it (Audi highlights on the HUD the speed limit). So all in all, I believe Hyundai f'up it big time, or something got really wrong in that car - a perfectly good reason to give it up either way.
Lane keeping assist helps when trying to use the increasingly complex infotainment systems to do simple things like adjust seat warmers.
I agree, and I think we're in a dangerous middle ground between fully engaged driving (manual transmissions) fully automated driving. It's hard to evaluate the net impact of these features, but I would not be surprised to learn that lane keeping actually results in more injuries and deaths due to distracted driving than it prevents
Lane keeping is also tremendously dangerous, if the system gets confused on e.g. construction sites. I hated how much I had to fight the car not to swerve into the huge barriers running along the middle of the original road layout.