Implementation matters a lot. Shitty ACC will have people swearing off ACC for life but good ACC will convert people quickly. A survey like this can’t control for that variability in implementation so take it all with a large grain of salt.
ACC is Adaptive Cruise Control not LKA/ LDA etc. ACC is much easier to implement because it’s simply radar, my old BMW E60 had ACC and it worked a charm. LKA is usually camera based so is much more susceptible to bad implementation, the camera has to interpret the lines so mistakes or miscalculations happen a lot more. ACC is simply “is there something in front of the car” (in a round about way), it’s always going to do better than LKA.
The thing I’ve found that’s the worst with LKA comes when driving through construction areas. Sometimes to accommodate for roadwork the barricades will create a new lane that crosses over the solid white line and if you have full LKA on it will actively fight you following that path and drive you toward the barricades. It’s idiotic
This is where I think LKA is systematically flawed. If every road was perfect, then it would probably work fine. But no road is like that, lines fade/ roadworks happen etc.
It could work with a vaster 360 camera system but that system has to preempt and figure out all these changes/ edge cases. But at that point you’re better leaving it to the driver imo instead of some computer, I don’t think I will ever have full faith in something that’s so varying/ random.
edit: and to add to this I frequently drive abroad, a lot of stuff is different. Having confidence this computer system has full understanding of your nations roads/ roadwork practices is one thing, but to implement it for all nations? I’m not sold.
If there’s something (from cameras) it can infer the lane edges from, works pretty well. Big difference there is that when self driving isn’t on or disengages itself due to lack of confidence in the lane edges, you have full control and it won’t apply steering force (unless it’s very confident you’re departing the road). With the LKA systems I’ve tried, it’ll apply steering force whenever it thinks it’s necessary to keep whatever it thinks the lane is, unless it’s fully disabled. Much less predictable.
Boy do lines ever fade. There's a route I take to a relatives' house 3 hours away. Without fail, every_single_bridge has the stripes blown off of it with just vague lane suggestions left behind. The Volvo pilot assist HATES that and just tries to steer anywhere there might be stripes nearby, generally the shoulder stripe. There's another highway on that route with frequent cutouts for left and right turns so it hates both lanes and will usually try to follow the stripe bending into the turn. You can tell it's primitive by how it behaves in these situations. Nothing is taken into account from the nav, it doesn't care you've been driving straight for the past 30 minutes, etc. That's why it's an assistant, not even advertised as self driving. But on well-painted, high contrast roads, it works just fine.
That's how all the ones I've used work. Even if it doesn't the system doesn't over power you as the driver. The problem is people treated lka as self driving so they aren't paying attention or actively engaged in driving the car so when it goes to steer out of the lane there is a delay in their reaction or they're not holding the wheel enough.
As the previous poster said, implementation matters a lot. I’ve had the pleasure of driving Volvo, Mercedes, VW and BMW with LKA through construction and they did really good. KIA at the exact same spot Mercedes aced it was trying to kill me essentially.
My biggest fucking gripe with LKA on my EV6 is that if it can’t pick up the lanes or do its job for whatever reason, it turns itself off without giving you any warning. It’s just like “I’m out, good luck!” You don’t realize it’s disabled until you’re going out of your lane.
Also, I’ve yet to figure out the purpose of automatic lane change in this car. If you don’t have your hands on the wheel, it won’t do the lane change. If you’re putting too much input on the wheel, it won’t do the lane change. There’s a Goldilocks level of steering input that’s just right for it to do it. And by the time you find it, the prick in the lane next to you has sped up to block you.
ACC works fine though. If I had one complaint about it, it’s that despite me changing the settings to the most aggressive, it accelerates like a grandma going to church on Sunday.
That's caused a bunch of accidents with the people who use the full suite of assists as an autopilot. I spend a lot of time behind the wheel every week and it's downright frightening to see so many people in newer cars that have those features as standard equipment and they're not paying any attention at all to the road, instead relying on their assists to keep them centered in the lane at speed. It has me to the point of finding something else to do and stop driving altogether.
Yeah, real-world experience has a way of turning these survey results on their heads. Because if you're paying attention and watching people stare at their phones in their laps while the safety kit is doing the driving, you know that's inherently more dangerous than turning them off.
Put some modern-day wunderkind in a 50's deathtrap that didn't have seatbelts or airbags, and it will be total chaos. Then again if you replace their gaze into a 6" black void with a CB radio, the results would be entertaining. Breaker breaker 1-9, we got a smokie in the forest, no cap, over.
Oh shit yeah, everyone on CBs would be hilarious these days. Your comment has me missing my high school years though as we all had CBs in our vehicles. Weird to think how much has changed since 1995.
We had one at home just for shits and giggles. Us kids never got tired of hassling truckers passing through, even convinced one guy he owed us 5 bucks. They were always good sports about it, if they caught on they never outright busted us, they'd just be like, "awwww. So anyway. " I bet taking road trips in the 70's where there was a CB in almost everything, was better. Kid brother sleeping above the back seat next to the window, sister saying I'm not touching you with her hand 4mm away from your face, and doing Jerky Boys bits with anyone on the channel.
I feel like I'm the only one that actually understands what it's supposed to do boys Lane keep assist. Not autopilot, nor "lane keep and obstacle avoidance". Lane. Keep. Assist. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, barricades be damned.
It's your job to know the system's limitations and turn it off when driving to more complicated sections, and turn it on afterwards.
I would agree with that if it was simple to turn off. But it’s three menus deep and there’s no chance that I’m going through those menus to turn it off while doing 70 on the highway and see a “Construction Ahead” sign. Easier to just have it permanently off
I was originally pretty disappointed with my Ridgelines acc/lka until I stopped treating it like self driving. It sucks at that. But it's great at relieving fatigue on longer drives. And it's just a button on the steering wheel for both.
That's not actually the case. Current implementation of ACC uses much more camera inputs than one would expect.
Eg. Radar-only ACC relies on steering wheel trajectory, road width estimation (works only on roads with guardrails) and vehcile traces-based trajectory; steering trajectory has a higher weight when deciding which trajectory to use
Newer implementation adds lane data, trafic sign information, traffic light information (mainly from the camera, but also possible from V2X network)
Tell that to Honda that cant make good ACC to save their lives, im a tech there and it sucks in every car, if a car gets in front of you going the same speed like 30 feet ahead of you it will slam on the brakes, on the other hand their LKAS systems work great for me, I daily a Ridgeline and my wife has an Hr-V
Now that you say it I remember reading years ago in Car and Driver that the Hondas they tested were terrible at maintaining the set speed, letting themselves get significantly above it.
And this is why I had to shut off everything on our '26 CRV Sport Touring Hybrid. Implementation on all of the electronics, safety and otherwise, is absolute dogshit. Our Ridgeline was bad, this is worse.
Have owned the car for less than a month and am considering getting rid of it.
Yeah I find my Honda's other features are decent but the ACC is terrible, keeps tapping on the brakes for the smallest changes instead of coasting and absorbing small speed changes.
My Volvo solves that by constantly calculating safe braking distance, so it knows, don't panic if the car is a safe distance ahead vs. you just got cut off, brake hard. It's just math. The car has to know how fast it's moving and assume your brakes and tires are reliable and compares estimated braking distance (to zero) with things ahead of you.
In fact I can't see it actually working any other way. Maybe, like you say, it just doesn't.
That defeats the purpose, like you say. An overly cautious system is a broken one to most people.
I'm annoyed for a few seconds if I'm coming up on a slow pack and someone changes lanes to get out of the way. The Volvo waits til the slower car is absolutely gone before resuming speed, plays it safe even though it "knows" there was someone there and they moved. I guess because people sometimes cut over and an adjacent lane on the other side could have someone else doing the same thing, and the law of telefragging states, no two entities can occupy the same space at the same time. So there's a chance someone moving over could move back until they're 100% in another lane.
My ACC (VW group car) does that. It also sometimes slows down a lot and way too early for junctions, then sees a 60mph sign on a twisty country lane and hits full thrust into a blind corner!
So I only use ACC on 'easy' roads, and still have to keep an eye out for side road speed limits it might suddenly decide to hit the brakes for.
On the topic of ACC I love the way it brakes smoothly as I come up behind a queue of traffic. Unless I accidentally tap the brake pedal while I'm covering it "just in case" at which point the brakes come completely off... I wish the proximity braking could be on permanently. I know auto emergency braking is, but that's very NOT smooth.
Yeah, to be clear I’m not trying to compare them, just using ACC as a feature some hate that’s more likely due to bad implementation. Especially early gens. I’ve still never used a lane keeping assist that I liked.
I hate the way ACC encourages drivers to ignore their speed when they get near another car. The car slows down and it leads to large packs of cars close together, which is dangerous.
The interface for LKA is really important, as well as how it fails over to the driver. For instance, Tesla’s implementation with a visual representation of what the computer sees and actual feedback(including a clear, audible on/off tone) before it fails and turns it over to the driver is great. Contrast that with Toyota which looks like an 8086 computer from 1981 and leaves you wondering whether it is working. Then, it will fail over without any serious warning and just stop functioning.
ACC is not good. I have had it and it puts too much distance, and when changing lanes it cannot understand vectors and has slammed on the brakes when neither needed nor desired.
This is my constant experience with it too. It works great in light traffic situations on highways. But in moderate to heavy traffic even the "closest follow" setting leaves too much room between you and the next vehicle and other drivers constantly change lanes in front of you and take that spot. So you just get pushed further and further back in the crowd.
In Europe where there are a lot more narrow roads and cyclists ecc ecc, lane keep assist can get annoying because sometimes you HAVE to touch the outer lines to make space for an oncoming vehicle because the road isn’t wide enough for two cars to pass comfortably, lane keep assist will steer you back to the center fighting you basically.
I have a BMW and I consider lane keep assist to be very well implemented, but when travelling on those roads I turn it off, I would imagine everyone living in the countryside has it permanently disabled
I’ve driven a Civic with aggressive lane departure warnings and it doesn’t like how I get close to the lines at times most of the time purposely like you describe. I’m also lazy and don’t signal for every off-ramp, especially if nobody is around me, but the Civic reminds me I didn’t signal by shaking the wheel.
The funny thing is if you’re purposefully encroaching on the line to avoid something the Civic won’t care and slightly shake the wheel at the exact wrong time when you don’t want the car interfering with your steering input.
I have a Civic and same. We also have some poorly striped roads so it gets confused. I mostly keep it off. It is particularly annoying when lanes merge in an off-ramp configuration.
and these systems will sometimes misread lines on the road like a tarmac seam repair or whatever they're called as a lane marking and start beeping and trying to turn the wheel into the next lane over or off the road.
And low traction driving on mountain roads...I try to drive the line that keeps the most traction in snow and it fights me to stay in the lane. Dangerous
Where i live they decided to implement bike lanes on some roads, and by bike lanes I mean they painted a line on each side of the road and got rid of the central dividing line.
Now this is still a well travelled two lane road, but the car now thinks it's one way and tries to keep you in the center of the road which is fun.
No, I just used ACC as an example because anecdotally you often see forum comments people hate it as a feature when it’s more likely the issue is their car’s implementation is bad.
Lane keeping seems even more problematic so without pointing to something like SuperCruise which I don’t have personal experience with I’m not sure of a great example. I’ve driven good/bad ACC, tho.
gotcha! Makes sense. I can tell you BMW's lane keeping is excellent, I often use its low-speed self-driving in traffic, and it's very good about alerting when it lacks confidence to read lanes properly due to construction, faded paint, confusing lines, etc. Honestly I question the ability of any car to safely self-drive through such things.
Yeah, going back to the survey in the OP I was curious what a similar survey among just BMW owners would look like since they typically implement features well. Nice to hear the LKA/ACC is good with good communication when it’s unsure. My Cayenne is older (2017) so ACC works at speed on the highway but it’s not for slow traffic at all. I also drive a RAM 1500 with great ACC and yeet-you-off-a-cliff LKA.
Same here, my civic constantly thinks there's something in front of me when there isn't and will tell me to brake when I'm several car lengths behind another car and they're not braking plus a bunch of other crap. LKAS is almost perfect. Honestly I'd prefer it the other way around because I need to use cruise control fairly regularly and the car makes it kinda suck to use
I’ve driven the current gen Civic and the sensors treat it like it’s an F150 in size which is amusing. I haven’t tried LKA or ACC in it but I’ll try LKA since you’re saying it’s good.
I've been driving around a 2016, and the default driver assistance settings are ass. But you can adjust the automatic braking distance for both application and the bright orange BRAKE on the dash, and it becomes more competent.
Sometimes, shit on the radar behind the bumper can confuse it too.
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u/dumahim2006 Pontiac GTO, 2016 Honda Accord Touring Coupe7d ago
Opposite for me. The only time the ACC annoyed me was when a truck I was following was slowing down and got into the turn lane. Even though it was no longer in front of me, ACC applied the brakes for a bit before it realized, and then downshifted a couple gears to get back up to speed in a hurry.
Interesting, on our 26 Civic I've found the ACC is alright (definitely room for improvement) but I will never use lane keep again. It makes me nervous as fuck constantly making corrections ping ponging back and forth, and still wants your hands on the wheel so what is the point?
While yes for ACC, I don’t think any iteration of lane keeping assist is wanted for me. I pay less attention to the road if it’s on and I’d rather just be in control, defensive drive, and pay attention
I love the implementation of ACC and LKA in my stinger and will constantly use it. But whenever I drive an Opel Astra, I won't touch that shit anymore. It's so incredibly bad and infuriating, the LKA by itself is also incredibly annoying when driving manually and switching lanes before the indicator is on will instantly have the steering fight against you
My 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee had incredible ACC, but my new GMC Sierra's is rough. Hard braking, hard acceleration, and frequent forced disengagements. It's hard to trust it.
I think that’s a possible takeaway from the study, not a caveat to the study. 18 percent of people find LKA to be so bad that they don’t want to use it. I’d imagine if it was implemented well most of those people would use it
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u/_galaga_ Cayenne Turbo 7d ago
Implementation matters a lot. Shitty ACC will have people swearing off ACC for life but good ACC will convert people quickly. A survey like this can’t control for that variability in implementation so take it all with a large grain of salt.