I wonder what will happen with the 2022's and their emergency steering that comes with Eyesight??? I'm sure there will be stories to tell.

 

Eyesight isn't self driving.
I'd suggest reading the part of the owners manual that covers Eyesight and Subaru's other safety features.
If you want self driving I believe Tesla is the only manufacture to currently offer it.

 

Eyesight isn't self driving.

I don't think that's the point @bbottomley was trying to make. It's pretty clear Subarus are not autonomous vehicles. The admin was just pointing out that certain weather/seasonal related phenomenon is able to fool the eyesight system into thinking that you are departing a lane at this stage of eyesight technology.

Tesla's self-driving technology is still in the beta testing mode. Recent test drives of the new self-driving technology has proven unreliable. The current Autopilot available now is just an enhanced form of cruise control that people unfortunately mistake for self-driving capabilities.

Redirect Notice

 

Yes, I understand. It's a step along the way, and while it's still showing this kind of flaws we aren't ready to take the next step.

i love Eyesight, but I do respect my continued obligations to be in charge.

 

I’m certain Subaru would argue with anyone who even thinks the system is self driving.

I do have a new appreciation for the lane keep assist function of my 2019. My wife’s new Lexus has lane centering and I learned to dislike it after two ten-hour days of highway driving. The Toyota/Lexus system is never satisfied with what it thinks is the center of the road, or what I think is the center of the road. It dithers about constantly. I had plenty of time to try all manner of steering wheel input, and no matter what, the system responds after a second or two with little nudges in the opposite direction. When I lighten my touch to give the system more control, it complains with an alert. Ugh. It’s a little like driving in a gusty crosswind, only more subtle. I don’t know if I can adjust the sensitivity or change it to “lane keep” only, with no lane centering. Not a topic for this forum.

Anyway, I like the Subaru lane keep assist in my 2019. It nudges if I let the car wander too much, and 99% of the time does nothing. I’ve had it nudge when it shouldn’t maybe two times in the 2.5 years I’ve had it.

You folks with 2020+ models, does your lane centering behave like I described above with the Lexus? Can you disable lane centering and have only the lane keep bit active?

 

With the 20/21, it's not a matter of disabling. You have to manually turn it on. First you activate cruise control, then you hit another button to turn on lane centering. It's totally optional and you have to opt into it.

I don't drive much, and this is my first car with driver assist, only had the 2021 for about a month and only done one highway trip, and I didn't fight it, just let it do it's thing, kept 1 finger pressure on the bottom of the steering wheel and it was happy to plod along, drove 4 hours round trip. Never felt so relaxed afterward.

 

I tried mine a few times with mixed results. On one stretch of newly paved, newly painted highway it worked brilliantly and kept the car nice centered in the lane without any input from me. Other times, if the paint lines are worn or there is no real shoulder on the highway I had to turn it off as it kept moving me all over the highway and sometimes even off the highway towards the ditch. Generally, I just keep it turned off.

 

I don't own an SK, but my experience with lane centering on the newer loaners I've driven is mixed.

I had a '21 Ascent with barely 1500 miles on the clock that had a nasty habit of pulling toward any semi, bus or RV beside me. It stayed centered in the lane any other time. I gave up and turned the LKA off. I suspect that one wasn't calibrated properly at the factory and I told the dealer that when I turned it in.

The other was a '21 Crosstrek. With that one you could take your hands off the wheel going into a curve and the LKA/LCA would follow the curve perfectly...or until it started nagging you to put your hands back on the wheel!

 

I don't own an SK, but my experience with lane centering on the newer loaners I've driven is mixed.

I had a '21 Ascent with barely 1500 miles on the clock that had a nasty habit of pulling toward any semi, bus or RV beside me. It stayed centered in the lane any other time. I gave up and turned the LKA off. I suspect that one wasn't calibrated properly at the factory and I told the dealer that when I turned it in.

The other was a '21 Crosstrek. With that one you could take your hands off the wheel going into a curve and the LKA/LCA would follow the curve perfectly...or until it started nagging you to put your hands back on the wheel!

If my car started pulling towards big rigs, I would definitely turn off the lane keep assist pernanantly! My steering is especially sensitive because I installed a Perrin steering coupler and a Nameless strut tower brace.

 

The first Kindle e-reader I bought in 2009 came with a feature called the "experimental browser." They were very clear that you could use it to browse the internet, but it was not in any way supported by or guaranteed by Amazon. Eleven years later, Kindles still come with the "experimental browser" for which Amazon continues to take no responsibility.

All of these driver-assist technologies are supported in the same way, in the sense that, while they are supposed to function, they are in no way warranted to actually protect you. If a camera fails they will fix the camera if it's under warranty, but if it fails and you crash because you didn't hit the brakes yourself, too bad.

I expect this will be the case for a long time to come, and the inability/unwillingness of manufacturers to guarantee the actual performance of these systems means that drivers will remain responsible for the consequences of their driving for the foreseeable future.

The law, and the insurance industry, also lag behind. Teslas are very expensive to insure, but generally, AFAIK, liability doesn't change at all whatever systems may be active in a car that crashes. The driver is the driver. And if the driver wants to blame the car, well, that warranty is quite explicit about what the assist systems can be expected to do. Which is nothing.

 

self driving isn't yet ready

I self-drive all the time - can't afford a chauffeur

 

As someone who puts nearly 10,000 mile/year driving for Uber, Autonomous vehicles are not even close. GPS functionality leaves a lot to be desired. Can't tell you how many times the APP (Uber, Google Maps, WYSE) have all sent me to the wrong location, and if Autonomous vehicles depend on GPS! Good luck.

 

We once saw a place in England where a road and a river merged for a few hundred yards. Despite caution signs, there were cases of big trucks, typically operated by drivers from Eastern Europe, attempting to drive through, guided by GPS.

Who reads signs?

Yes, that's the road. Most fords are perpendicular. Not this one.

GPS in Scotland once took us on a track through a farmer's field. We met a tractor on the way.

 

@bman400 - that GPS is less than reliable is a massive understatement...

I use a few different mapping apps for different reasons - mostly Google Maps and the Waze app for when directions are desired.

I live in a development of 220 homes on 47 acres with a great set of common facilities - pool, tennis, hot tubs, community center with gym, bar, library, billiards and more. The roadways are laid out in a big round-cornered square "boulevard" with 8 cul-de-sacs going towards the center greenspace. There are about 14 homes on each cul-de-sac and the rest are on the "rim" road..

When I first moved in, Google maps showed my address (on the outer rim) as being in the south east corner of the development. I'm not. My home is on the northern edge of the development and 3 lots from the center, main gate in. I was - after many years - finally able to "pin" my home in the proper location, and so many Google map based apps get my house right. Some still show the "old" location.

Waze has my house in another location - about half-way down the outer rim on the east side of the development. My old Magellan GPS unit shows yet another location - over on the west side of the property, about halfway down the block, and others have me all over the place; at least none show me as being on one of the cul-de-sac locations. For almost 15 years I've constantly had to give instructions on where my house is when they come for the first time (like delivery outside of USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc.... But for repair folks or a handyman...? Or even worse is if I use Door Dash or one of the food delivery services... When they call from the gate, I'll reinforce those delivery instructions I put in the app at the time of my order.

Of odd note, when they laid out the development and the house numbers, they started at "1" and looped around the outside of the rim road; at the back of the property (south side) in the middle, they jumped across the road and numbered "back" towards the front, going down and up each cul-de-sac, all the way back to the front (north) and then continued numbering all the "inside" home lots, again to the center of the back, jumped across and then came back 'round the front to the north side and the entry gate. Then came the problem... they only had 219 lots number but 220 homesites... After a few days of head-scratching somebody finally realized that lot #220 was (at the time) a parking lot for the model home tour. That lot was then numbered 220 - and sits right between the bridge to the community building and house number 112.... And this was even before any of the houses were built. Stupid, eh?

 

IMO the only real “self-driving” future is limited-access roads where the limit is “vehicles must be compatible with this road’s control system.” Roads that know where every car is at every moment and can control them at all times. And while such roads are foreseeable, particularly certain toll highways, IMO self-driving on ordinary surface streets and roads will not — definitely should not — happen anytime soon.

 

I personally love Eyesight, I take a fair amount of long drives, and it's an incredibly useful tool. But I use as such, as a tool to assist with the tedium of cruising down straight or gently curving, well-marked roads. Eliminating the need for needlessly constant steering input. I'm familiar with it's capabilities, and the situations that are likely to confuse a system like Eyesight feel plainly obvious to me, and as such I don't run into odd situations where it does something unexpected. I also don't use lane-centering in extremely high-consequence situations like tight traffic at high-speeds.

That being said, I agree with the above. I feel that the most we'll get from self-driving in the near future (talking decades), are highly-mapped, specifically geofenced regions like major metro centers, and well-marked highways (in good weather, of course). Honestly even as someone who wants my car to mostly drive itself because it's a waste of time, this would be far more than enough for me.

Maybe after a couple decades of millions of cars handling geofenced regions and highway driving would we begin to approach something like a general-purpose self-driving car.

 

^^^^^ What he said. That is what I envision as well. There has to be some form of communication between the vehicle and road's control system, so that both know where/how/what is going on. Combined with vehicle to vehicle communication. The road needs to be able to communicate back to the vehicle if the road is passable, driveable, etc....And vehicles need to know where all the other vehicles are located around it.

You all did see the article about the police officers getting hit by a Tesla!!!!!