I’m so glad to see I’m not the only one with issues with those “driver nanny” systems, as I call them. The one in our Mazda regularly false alarms in left turn lanes, and occasionally triggers on signposts and shit while turning right. I had to turn off the lane assist; the damn thing kept steering me back toward obstacles I was actively trying to avoid (I guess I’m “supposed” to swerve to avoid them, but that was not how I learned to drive - swerving is something that should be done only in an emergency, and an obstacle I can see well ahead isn’t an emergency). The emergency braking alarm is occasionally triggered by cars parked along the road on a curve.
It doesn’t help that the alarm in that car is like nails on a chalkboard to me - it just instantly pisses me off. Why can’t it just be a nice little chime or something? Unfortunately, we didn’t hear the alarm until we were getting the overview from the salesman during delivery - during the test drive, the salesman had started it without us there and drove it to the door, and we just hopped in, then we didn’t trigger it during the test drive. The first time I heard it was when I started the car during delivery - “WHAT IS THAT NOISE?” Salesman: “Oh it’s just the driver seat belt alarm.” “Oh.” Then a few days later, on our way to work, it gave us its first false alarm, and I almost hit the brakes because I thought there was something seriously wrong with the car and I should stop driving it. Nope, it was just misinterpreting the situation.
It’s to the point where I will only drive the car on local trips - if we’re going out of town, I will take the pickup. It’s more expensive to drive, but so much more comfortable, and it doesn’t have blaring alarms screeching at me.
Unfortunately I think practically all cars these days have that shit, so I won’t have any options when my wife finally lets me get rid of the Mazda. In my ideal world, we’d buy a 2016 Honda Accord V6 (the last year they made them with V6 engines) and just keep that running forever. However, I doubt my wife would agree to that plan.
I would REALLY like to see the crash statistics for those cars. Theoretically the frequency and/or severity of crashes should be reduced, right? But road fatalities are up the last few years…which may indicate those safety features aren’t helping, or maybe they’re making people too confident, or maybe they are helping and the situation would be even worse without them. But no one seems to have that info.
A close friend of mine also hates her new Mazda for all the “helping” it tries to do! It sounds like they really botched that. I’d be demanding a refund for an undrivable car.
It’s extremely irritating. I didn’t get into the frustration with the adaptive cruise (at least they fixed the nauseating issues it had originally) and other irritations I have with that car.
But, I will say: When I turn things off in the Mazda, like the thing that steers the car back toward the center of the lane, it fucking stays off. I’ve heard a lot of other vehicles turn that shit back on every time you start the car. Christ.
This really is a bad trend of half-baked half-measures between human drivers and fully autonomous vehicles. There isn’t a lot of room for “semi-autonomous” operation - humans generally expect to either be fully in control of the situation, or to relinquish all control to another (ignoring backseat drivers). Anything else can be annoying and unexpected unless done very subtly, carefully, and correctly.
My new VW has all of these sensors and safety features, but manages to not freak out until something is truly imminent, obviously properly accounting for speed and trajectory, and with only gentle nudges when the situation is less dire (e.g., lane drift), but more aggressively in the face of real danger (backing up into incoming traffic).
Yeah. I’m reminded of a story out of Reagan National Airport 10-15 years ago, when the single controller in the tower fell asleep overnight. Sounds bad, right? Except that they cannot take a book or music or anything else. They’re alone at night because traffic is so light. Basically, they’re supposed to sit there all night, alone, on alert, doing nothing other than waiting for an occasional plane to arrive. It’s insane to think anyone could be able to do that without falling asleep sooner or later.
For cars, yeah - when I’m driving, my attention is fully on the car and my environment. If the car is driving, my attention is going to wander, and if it needs me to pop back into driving mode, that switch is going to take a moment or two. This is just human nature.
Oh and you know what’s even better? Because we’re all relying on our cars to do the driving most of the time, we’ll all get worse at actually driving, so when we are called upon in that emergency…it might not go very well, even if we do mode switch successfully instantly.
Driving a modern car has opened my eyes to how far off truly autonomous cars really are.
Autonomous cars are probably closer than you think. It’s a hard problem, and half-assery won’t cut it, but others’ failures aren’t necessarily indicative of an inability to succeed.
Maybe. But I just think about the myriad of driving situations I regularly encounter, and the sheer amount of logic required to deal with it. Construction. Debris in the road. Cyclists. Deer. Snow. Rain. Road closures.
Malfunctioning traffic lights - just yesterday we got caught by a traffic light that wasn’t giving the left-turn arrow, backing up traffic quite a bit. We were able to change course and work around it and still make our appointment on time, but how long would an autonomous vehicle sit and wait that situation out? Will an autonomous vehicle be able to safely make a left turn against traffic with only a standard green signal (no arrow)? Or would it be stuck waiting for an arrow that never comes? In theory, it could do it, but the reality seems a very long way off.
I can see it possibly working on highways, and certainly that is the primary focus now, but even then there are weird things that happen, like crashes, construction, and debris on the road.
If the roads were rebuilt with some sort of “track” (an electronic track, I mean, not a railroad track) that the cars could use, then the problem becomes much easier for the car (though you still have random variables). Of course, the problem with that is rebuilding the roads to have that track. That alone would take decades of work.
I suspect human driving is going to be around for a very long time, even if, say, highways can be handled autonomously.
I could be wrong, and if it does happen, then I’ll be wrong. But I also recall being told when I was 8 or 10 that by the time I turned 16, I’d just tell the car where to go and it would do it. Now I’m closing in on 50 and it’s STILL a long way off.
Well, the good news is that there are a lot of clever people already thinking about the same things you are, the necessary prerequisite technology actually now exists, and there are several companies actively working on it and seeing success.
I’m so glad to see I’m not the only one with issues with those “driver nanny” systems, as I call them. The one in our Mazda regularly false alarms in left turn lanes, and occasionally triggers on signposts and shit while turning right. I had to turn off the lane assist; the damn thing kept steering me back toward obstacles I was actively trying to avoid (I guess I’m “supposed” to swerve to avoid them, but that was not how I learned to drive - swerving is something that should be done only in an emergency, and an obstacle I can see well ahead isn’t an emergency). The emergency braking alarm is occasionally triggered by cars parked along the road on a curve.
It doesn’t help that the alarm in that car is like nails on a chalkboard to me - it just instantly pisses me off. Why can’t it just be a nice little chime or something? Unfortunately, we didn’t hear the alarm until we were getting the overview from the salesman during delivery - during the test drive, the salesman had started it without us there and drove it to the door, and we just hopped in, then we didn’t trigger it during the test drive. The first time I heard it was when I started the car during delivery - “WHAT IS THAT NOISE?” Salesman: “Oh it’s just the driver seat belt alarm.” “Oh.” Then a few days later, on our way to work, it gave us its first false alarm, and I almost hit the brakes because I thought there was something seriously wrong with the car and I should stop driving it. Nope, it was just misinterpreting the situation.
It’s to the point where I will only drive the car on local trips - if we’re going out of town, I will take the pickup. It’s more expensive to drive, but so much more comfortable, and it doesn’t have blaring alarms screeching at me.
Unfortunately I think practically all cars these days have that shit, so I won’t have any options when my wife finally lets me get rid of the Mazda. In my ideal world, we’d buy a 2016 Honda Accord V6 (the last year they made them with V6 engines) and just keep that running forever. However, I doubt my wife would agree to that plan.
I would REALLY like to see the crash statistics for those cars. Theoretically the frequency and/or severity of crashes should be reduced, right? But road fatalities are up the last few years…which may indicate those safety features aren’t helping, or maybe they’re making people too confident, or maybe they are helping and the situation would be even worse without them. But no one seems to have that info.
A close friend of mine also hates her new Mazda for all the “helping” it tries to do! It sounds like they really botched that. I’d be demanding a refund for an undrivable car.
It’s extremely irritating. I didn’t get into the frustration with the adaptive cruise (at least they fixed the nauseating issues it had originally) and other irritations I have with that car.
But, I will say: When I turn things off in the Mazda, like the thing that steers the car back toward the center of the lane, it fucking stays off. I’ve heard a lot of other vehicles turn that shit back on every time you start the car. Christ.
This really is a bad trend of half-baked half-measures between human drivers and fully autonomous vehicles. There isn’t a lot of room for “semi-autonomous” operation - humans generally expect to either be fully in control of the situation, or to relinquish all control to another (ignoring backseat drivers). Anything else can be annoying and unexpected unless done very subtly, carefully, and correctly.
My new VW has all of these sensors and safety features, but manages to not freak out until something is truly imminent, obviously properly accounting for speed and trajectory, and with only gentle nudges when the situation is less dire (e.g., lane drift), but more aggressively in the face of real danger (backing up into incoming traffic).
Yeah. I’m reminded of a story out of Reagan National Airport 10-15 years ago, when the single controller in the tower fell asleep overnight. Sounds bad, right? Except that they cannot take a book or music or anything else. They’re alone at night because traffic is so light. Basically, they’re supposed to sit there all night, alone, on alert, doing nothing other than waiting for an occasional plane to arrive. It’s insane to think anyone could be able to do that without falling asleep sooner or later.
For cars, yeah - when I’m driving, my attention is fully on the car and my environment. If the car is driving, my attention is going to wander, and if it needs me to pop back into driving mode, that switch is going to take a moment or two. This is just human nature.
Oh and you know what’s even better? Because we’re all relying on our cars to do the driving most of the time, we’ll all get worse at actually driving, so when we are called upon in that emergency…it might not go very well, even if we do mode switch successfully instantly.
Driving a modern car has opened my eyes to how far off truly autonomous cars really are.
Autonomous cars are probably closer than you think. It’s a hard problem, and half-assery won’t cut it, but others’ failures aren’t necessarily indicative of an inability to succeed.
Maybe. But I just think about the myriad of driving situations I regularly encounter, and the sheer amount of logic required to deal with it. Construction. Debris in the road. Cyclists. Deer. Snow. Rain. Road closures.
Malfunctioning traffic lights - just yesterday we got caught by a traffic light that wasn’t giving the left-turn arrow, backing up traffic quite a bit. We were able to change course and work around it and still make our appointment on time, but how long would an autonomous vehicle sit and wait that situation out? Will an autonomous vehicle be able to safely make a left turn against traffic with only a standard green signal (no arrow)? Or would it be stuck waiting for an arrow that never comes? In theory, it could do it, but the reality seems a very long way off.
I can see it possibly working on highways, and certainly that is the primary focus now, but even then there are weird things that happen, like crashes, construction, and debris on the road.
If the roads were rebuilt with some sort of “track” (an electronic track, I mean, not a railroad track) that the cars could use, then the problem becomes much easier for the car (though you still have random variables). Of course, the problem with that is rebuilding the roads to have that track. That alone would take decades of work.
I suspect human driving is going to be around for a very long time, even if, say, highways can be handled autonomously.
I could be wrong, and if it does happen, then I’ll be wrong. But I also recall being told when I was 8 or 10 that by the time I turned 16, I’d just tell the car where to go and it would do it. Now I’m closing in on 50 and it’s STILL a long way off.
Well, the good news is that there are a lot of clever people already thinking about the same things you are, the necessary prerequisite technology actually now exists, and there are several companies actively working on it and seeing success.