Lane keep assist

peasant

Any of ye got an active system?
How does that work for you?

My yoke only got one of those that lights up the dashboard and shakes the steering wheel a bit, but does not correct.
Lately I'm daily driving narrow country roads with poor markings and more bends than you can throw a stick at. I'm no rally driver, but I want to get home and drive what you would call progressively. There are corners that need to be slightly cut, potholes/puddles that need swerving around, cyclist / oncoming lorries that force you over the lines / into the hedge.

In short...on every trip that light comes on a few times and the wheel shakes..no biggy and not yet annoying enough so that I would switch it off.

But it made me think...if I had an active system, I would have had plenty opportunity for quite bad accidents already...the car refusing to go where I need it to because the lane keeper counteracts.

So how do you get on with your lane keeper?

What Username Guidelines

Switched it off after about 3 days with it (corrective system)

It’s grand, but I don’t think the technology is quite there yet. It’s linked to blind spot detectors too, so even if you indicate to change lanes on motorway, it’ll vibrate and pull you back a little if something is in your blind spot.

My issues were:

if I was being overtaken on a motorway for example, it took a second for the blind spot sensor and LED to go out after the overtaker had passed. This meant if I then went to move into that lane, I’d get the vibration and led flash which felt a little distracting while changing lanes.

Passing over yellow hatching made the system **** itself completely as it tried to correct left and right.

Passing a cyclist on an abandoned road so I didn’t indicate. Fair enough, should have. But as soon as I went to cross the line, it tried to pull it back.

It should be noted that it’s a very gentle correction. Absolutely no issue with overriding it, highly unlikely it’s gonna steer me into a ditch or the cyclist. It just didn’t really feel helpful.

mikeecho

It's a great system if you're after a few pints, and want to get home.

But if you want to drive on back roads and need to cross the white line in order to get a better line thru corners, it's a pain in the hole

m5ex9oqjawdg2i

Have it on my car and it's great. I can set the sensitivity and can switch between off, passive or active. Not a massive fan of active mode, but passive is great. Active is simply too weak to turn you into a ditch or the likes. It doesn't pull the wheel out of your hand or anything.

Dia_Anseo

It's only a matter of time before a class action law suit is initiated for the failures of these systems.

An American friend was driving a rented Opel insignia with these active systems but in the insignia the red warning light is on top of dash reflecting on windscreen. Anyway he was driving on a typical Irish regional road and going around the corner the system went off, red light flashed with a buzz and steering tried nudging the car in "lane" The American driver panicked and over compensated and accelerated the Insignia into the country ditch at the other side of the road.

The American driver lost his excess cover and wanted to sue the rental car company for not telling him about the active system.

biko

I have used it (it just beeps) on others cars and it's a PITA.

What Username Guidelines

biko wrote: »

I have used it (it just beeps) on others cars and it's a PITA.

I just cant see the need tbh. Reverse camera, autohandbrake (debatable), etc are all 'handy' features that actually feel like they do assist you. I didnt specify the lane-assist in my car, came with the trim level, but if I was getting another car it wouldn't be on my list of requirements - I have however come to rely heavily on reverse camera and my parking attempts in cars without have become embarrassingly hilarious.

biko

What Username Guidelines wrote: »

I have however come to rely heavily on reverse camera and my parking attempts in cars without have become embarrassingly hilarious.

Indeed, I tried parking herself's car without a camera and it took a laughable amount of time to get it right.

legrand

really only suitable for motorway driving imo. Have semi-autonomous on mine (lane keeping + adaptive cruise) - takes a lot of 'stress' out driving but not an opportunity nod off as have to keep hands on wheel (get about 20 secs hands free before switches off). My system also spots cyclists and warns accordingly - can be a bit intrusive when you're planning a maneuver and system reacts before you get to that point (that, or I leave things too late!)

For Forks Sake

Had it on my last car, thankfully there was the option to switch it off, as it didn't work when:
- it was raining
-when sun was shining towards the front of the car
-On N roads (where the line to the left was yellow)
-On the third Wednesday of every month.

Henry Ford III

Lane departure thing is handy for motorways. Reminds you to indicate too.

Sabre Man

Tesla Autopilot works great on motorways and other wide roads. I don't use it on narrow or very twisty roads.

peasant

Had a Skoda Scala rental there for the last two weeks (in Germany) and it did something really scary.
It has a corrective lane assist that nudges you a bit and blinks a light on the dash if you come to close the the white lines. So far, so good. Only the light is so small you don't really notice it on the dash, it was one of those new digital ones with all sorts of things going on, so all you really notice is the nudge-nudge from the steering wheel.

All fine and dandy on a straight motorway when you drift a bit.

But then it did something that nearly made me crash:

Motorway exit, one of those cloverleaf crossroads thingies, so pretty tight 270 degree bends.
Road is wide enough, I'm well between the lines.
It had been raining, the road surface is shiny. Whatever sensor controls this system must have picked up the seams in the tar where the road had been repaired / patched.
All of a sudden the stupid thing started to nudge me straight on. And it wouldn't turn back in easily either, I actually had to fight it. And when the steering wheel finally gave in, it overcorrected. So I had to steer back and it ****ing did it again, nudged me over the same non-existing line in the wrong direction.
A less experienced driver would have crashed, I wasn't far off it either.

And it did it not just once, but on three different occasions in three different locations, always in bends for no reason just not quite as brutal as the first time.
If I had bought this car, I'd be having choice words with the manufacturer right now...bloody lethal that is.

colm_mcm

The auto braking in VW stuff is a bit suspect too apparently.

GustavoFring

I've got it turned off. The steering constantly correcting for you even when you're in lane is irritating.

kirving

peasant wrote: »

I actually had to fight it. And when the steering wheel finally gave in, it overcorrected.

My car doesn't have the lane keep assist, but it was an option. It does have self parking though and so has the steering wheel motor and torque sensor.

It really does take a good jerk on the wheel to override the motor and activate the torque sensor while it's auto-parking. I really would not fancy doing that on a motorway slip road.

Plenty of people I'm sure wouldn't know what to do in that situation. I think the brake pedal should cancel the auto-correction?

tossy

I never turn on lane assist in the Golf, i jut don't like the way it makes the car behave. The auto braking is great it never misreads a situation and applies the brakes when not necessary and has saved me from a minor fender bender at least once.

L1011

Driven ~1500km in a Honda with it. No issues.

Driven ~1500km in a Audi with it where it turned off when it wasn't sure of the lines; but gave you a graphical indiciation that it was on/off. Main issue was that the indicator stalk sometimes took more pressure to push down than I expected so the indicator would go off (having only done three flashes) as I started to turn, and it'd buzz and try to correct.

Driven ~400km in a Nissan with it; and both it and the general protection system are utterly unreliable. Any narrow roads it shakes the wheel constantly even when you are between the lines. Also doesn't understand twisting lanes across junctions like the M50 N4. Correction could end up disasterous, should really turn it off.

The general protection systems flashed red warnings up applied the brakes on me because a truck passed in the opposite direction - both of us safely in our lanes - causing the biker who was a bit close behind to get rather pissed off.

Hellrazer

tossy wrote: »

I never turn on lane assist in the Golf, i jut don't like the way it makes the car behave. The auto braking is great it never misreads a situation and applies the brakes when not necessary and has saved me from a minor fender bender at least once.

New Civic collision avoidance saved my bacon in an incident that could have been a serious accident - to be completely honest I was never going to survive and there was no way the other driver was either.

Sitting in the auxillary lane on the M50 - heading for the N4 exit.
Im doing 100 (maybe 115).
Anyway this idiot in a Bmw pulls across from the outside right lane across 4 lanes of traffic to take the same exit...probably doing 150+ - ends up right in front of me.

Before I even had a chance to press the brake or even react the civic locked my seat belt,hit the brakes and steered away from the other car - all in miliseconds.
Definately saved my life... theres absolutely 100% no way I could have stopped in time.

Alun

I'm in two mind about these systems. I have a Kia Niro PHEV which has emergency braking, Lane Keeping Assist and Smart Cruise Control with Lane Following Assist.

Each of them has reacted in strange and unexpected ways in the short time I've had the car, and if I could I'd switch all of them off permanently but I can't.

I have a readily accessible button to switch off the LKA, which I do almost 100% of the time. It's OK on larger roads with clear well painted white lines, but in Ireland where that is a rarity, it keeps enabling/disabling itself depending on whether the line is visible or not. On crappy R roads, which I drive a lot, it's of no use, and keeps cutting in at random where you least expect it. There is an item in the setup which appears to disable it, or at least just change it to a beep and a warning rather than actively nudging the wheel, but bizarrely, despite being 2 or 3 levels down in a menu, resets itself when you restart the car. Same goes for the button.

I had a weird one with the emergency braking too. Travelling along a straight bit of R road, nobody else on the road apart from a few oncoming cars and a couple of cyclists dawdling along in front of me. I slow down to their speed, well back from them, and as soon as the oncoming cars were past me started to accelerate to pass them. All well for a second or so and the BANG. The car came to such a sudden violent stop I thought I'd crashed it, or it had stalled (difficult for a PHEV!). I can only assume it thought I was about to plough in to the back of the cyclists, whereas I was actually slowly accelerating and at the same time starting to pull out to overtake them. I panicked a bit as I didn't know what had happened and it took a good while to gather my senses and get the car moving again. Thank god there was nobody behind me while all this was happening is all I can say.

The SCC has a few quirks too, and sometimes reacts to cars to my left that have pulled off on to the exit lane and then slowed down by slowing down itself, also very dangerous. It also suddenly started to slow down on a 100km/h stretch of dual carriageway when it detected a cyclist on the hard shoulder.

In contrast the LFA actually works reasonably well, not quite autonomous driving, but the main problem is that you cant turn it off as far as I can see. It comes on automatically when you use the SCC, so it's all or nothing.

Again, I can switch all of these systems off in the car's setup menu, but they revert back to being on when I restart the car. Perversely there's another feature, Auto Hold which is actually very useful, that does the same but the opposite in that it's off by default, and I always switch it on before I move off.

It's getting to the stage that I almost need a checklist of stuff to switch on/off before I even start driving, like a pilot in an airliner.

micks_address

i have the lane assist in my tiguan.. its grand but i think id be switching it off if anyone else was driving the car. Especially on narrow roads if you are not expecting it the steering correction can be a bit jarring... i know of at least one person who crashed a brand new rav4 due to panicking when lane assist kicked in

AUDI20

Dia_Anseo wrote: »

It's only a matter of time before a class action law suit is initiated for the failures of these systems.

An American friend was driving a rented Opel insignia with these active systems but in the insignia the red warning light is on top of dash reflecting on windscreen. Anyway he was driving on a typical Irish regional road and going around the corner the system went off, red light flashed with a buzz and steering tried nudging the car in "lane" The American driver panicked and over compensated and accelerated the Insignia into the country ditch at the other side of the road.

The American driver lost his excess cover and wanted to sue the rental car company for not telling him about the active system.

I'd say thats more to do with the driver than the car to be honest

cruizer101

It is partially driver fault but I'd also place a fair bit of blame on the rental company.
If a car has systems like that they should warn you about it.

A few years ago I was in a rented insignia and on the motorway in the rain the system kicked in and pulled the wheel back against me.
I didn't know what was going on, luckily didn't overreact and after it happened a few times I figured out what it was
I could easily see how someone who maybe isn't the most confident of drivers, in a different car to usual, possibly on different side of road could end up in an accident because of one of those systems.

dastardly00

I had a rental Mercedes B Class for a few days in the Netherlands earlier this year. There were a lot of narrow roads where I was driving and there were white lines at the edges (say, unlike in Ireland). So the lane assist would activate quite frequently, but the auto brake would come on sometimes as well. Absolute disaster of a system.

blingrhino

First thing i turn off every morning when i start it - Audi A6.
Its the Worst thing about the car.

Alun

I agree. It's one thing knowingly buying a car with these systems, spending the time getting used to them, even, god forbid, reading the manual to know how to work them, but jumping into a random hire car and suddenly find it doing things unexpectedly can probably come as a bit of a shock.

It used to be that pretty much every car on the road worked the same, more or less, and you could hop from one to the other and there wouldn't be a steep learning curve, but with all these driver aids becoming more popular, and with every manufacturer having their own particular take on how they should work, that's becoming increasingly more difficult.

Henry Ford III

I use it on dual carriageways and motorways only.

The automatic collision alert is a p.i.t.a. though and can't be turned off either. If I accelerate before pulling out to overtake (without getting in any way close to the vehicle ahead) it goes off.

Casati

Have it in a Volvo - it’s a good system if you drive motorways most of the time as it will keep keep you in lane if your not observant and forces you to indicate changing lanes but I turned it off the first time I drove from Mitchelstown to Mallow and never turned it on since, it was a complete disaster and although it’s a gentle steer it was trying to kill me a few times

I have pilot assist that is good on motorway but also use adaptive cruise a fair bit, even on narrow back roads with traffic and find it v useful there

Would like to try to latest Tesla system but feel our inconsistent lane markings will mean we have to wait a long time for a system smart enough

kirving

Some of the issue too, is that for the time being, and due to the pace of development at the moment, every OEM has their own selection of ADAS system, and offer them in various combinations depending on what hardware and capability of the associated software.

But they're often marketed under something generic like "Safety Assist". One could basic camera based system that works up to 20km/h and detects cars and pedestrians (but not cyclists), and another can actively push you back into lane at 120kph and bring you to a full stop on a rainy motorway.

Not that you should be relying on them or anything, but if they're on, you do have to adjust you driving within their bounds. It may be okay to intentionally cut a corner in one system with a steering wheel torque sensor because it senses you're actively driving the car, while another system will react to the same circumstance.

I can get into any rental car, and without looking, know how the indicators, gears and wipers will work, because of broad standardisation across manufacturers.

Right now though, I can't do that for "Auto Lights". Are they on when it's bright but raining? What about in dusk? Are the tail lights on? In my current car, no lights on the dash means my DRL's are on, but the "side light" dashboard symbol means the DRL's are dimmed. Not to derail to lights, but an example of non-standardisation of something otherwise basic.

I think it's going to be a long while still before ADAS are standard to the level where a rental customer is completely comfortable with them. Until that time, drivers really should be made aware of what the car has fitted and it's capabilities.

road_high

New Bmw 3 series- turned it off as it drove me nuts. Would pull heavily on safe normal overtaking. Very disconcerting in my opinion

kirving

road_high wrote: »

New Bmw 3 series- turned it off as it drove me nuts. Would pull heavily on safe normal overtaking. Very disconcerting in my opinion

That's just BMW trying their best to get you to use the indicator