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by tablespoon 1278 days ago
> Honestly, I feel this way about pretty much all "driver assist" systems in the wild today.

My five year old Honda has a very limited driver assist system (radar cruise control + lane centering), which (in my opinion) is very good at what it's trying to do. It has no pretensions of being a "self-driving" system, but it very successfully manages to reduce some of the stress of driving and make my driving better. I think the key point is it only automates the fine adjustments and provides alerts, but is very careful to never allow the driver to rely on it too much.

2 comments

I feel the same way about my Subaru's EyeSight system. It helps me stay in the lane, and annoys me if I get distracted and cross a line. It slows down the car automatically when it detects an obstacle ahead. It speeds up and slows down automatically to maintain a mostly-steady speed when I set cruise control.

Until autonomous vehicles reach "read a book or fall asleep" levels, this is all I'm interested in. No thank you to any dumb "autopilot" system that I can't actually trust, but tries to control my wheel.

I’ve had the same experience with eyesight. I would also add that it brakes very naturally. Much better than other similar systems I have tried.
I've also driven a Subaru with EyeSight. I think it's pretty good too, and kinda follows the same philosophy as my Honda, but with different tradeoffs. The Subaru doesn't lane center, so it's less relaxing to drive on the highway because you have to pay more attention to fine tuning your lane position. On the other hand, my Honda deliberately won't automatically come to a stop to avoid a collision (it will only slow down in the last few seconds), so it's more annoying in stop-and-go traffic.
Exactly! I would also add emergency breaking at low speeds so that pedestrian stepping in front of the car from nowhere can be spared. There is no need for real self driving, it wouldn’t really change anything and we are not even close to that.