Lane keep assist

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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