Is GM’s Super Cruise the answer for those boring cross-country tows?

In reply to Berck :

Thanks for posting that 

6  thumbs up  , you need to repost that often when people gets excited about Auto pilot  especially Teslas,

In reply to Berck :

I pretty much feel the way you and Keith do on this. I don't even like automatic emergency braking.

I'm okay with things that supplement what a driver can do. As JG said in the article, a driver can't monitor 360* around the vehicle. And something like speed control is easily handled off - you've got more references than a pilot does. I just think there needs to be enough demand to keep the driver engaged, and "car follows your eyes" means that steering falls under that category pretty easily. Navigation has already been handed off to an outside system.

AEB is a boon if it works well, it supplements the driver's reaction time. It's a problem if it's implemented poorly and falses, as we've seen with recalls on Mazdas for example.

Keith Tanner said:

AEB is a boon if it works well, it supplements the driver's reaction time. It's a problem if it's implemented poorly and falses, as we've seen with recalls on Mazdas for example.

My issue with AEB is that there are conditions where an emergency lane change is a better option that braking. 

I recently had a car pull off the shoulder onto the highway, there was a car just behind me but I had just enough time/room to change lanes.

Had the car been equipped with AEB it would have triggered just as I was trying to make the lane change. We would have either slammed into the back of the other car or hip checked the other one............it was that close.

I am cognizant of the fact that most drivers on the road don't posses the skills that most of us here do but I still don't like AEB.

In reply to Tom1200 :

I've had a 2020 Tacoma since 2020 and a GR Corolla for about 6 months now and I've never had the automatic braking activate.  This is anecdata, but I was worried about the situations you describe, but after real-world experience I'm not sure it's a valid worry, at least for whatever Toyota's done.  I've been in situations exactly as you describe and escaped with a lane change just fine with the pre-collision alert screaming and "BRAKE NOW" displayed on the dash.  (Only noticed the dash display after evading, of course.) The vehicle did not apply the brakes at all, and if it had, I probably would have gotten in a collision.  I'm not sure, but my impression is that the threshold for automatic braking is such that you've got be in a situation where you are absolutely going to hit the car in front of you before it activates.  Meaning that the braking isn't intended to prevent the collision, but rather just lessen it.  Maybe someone with some more knowledge about how these are designed can confirm/deny my suspicions.

Twice I've had people move in front of me where I changed lanes to avoid running into them, and once I intentionally didn't brake for a car that was slowing down an turning in front of me.  The car got very annoyed at me, even though I could tell the car was going to be out of my way before I got there, so I didn't need to slow down, but the car thought I needed to.  It didn't do anything for me in either case, other than the beeping.

I'm pretty sure you can adjust the paranoia level of the AEB in our car. You can certainly do so for the warnings. I very rarely set off the alarm and have never caused it to brake. 

I think Mercedes started with some braking assist because they found that people don't apply the brakes heavily enough, soon enough when presented with an emergency braking situation. By increasing braking level early, they could cut down braking distances quite a bit. This was some time ago, I don't know if they've modified their approach. They also (used to?) turn on the four way flashers, you'd see them activating on Top Gear laps sometimes.

My Focus RS didn't have any fancy collision detection, but would detect the rate at which you hit the brake pedal.  Apply the brakes very quickly, and it would apply full ABS braking long before you actually pushed the pedal far enough to do this.  The pedal would go soft and the car would keep max braking even for a split second after you took your foot off the pedal.  Terrifying, but potentially useful.

The Tacoma has something similar, but presumably based on the radar: "Pre-collision brake assist: When the system determines that the possibility of a frontal collision is high, the system applies greater braking force in relation to how strongly the brake is depressed."  This is in addition to the pre-collision braking where "If the system determines that the possibility of a frontal collision is extremely high, the brakes are automatically applied to help avoid the collision or reduce the collision speed."

I can definitely adjust the paranoia level of the warnings in both Toyotas.  I don't think that has any affect on the braking, and the manual indicates that what you can change is "pre-collision warning timing".

Reading the manual now, and this should make Tom feel a bit better:
"If either of the following occur while the pre-collision braking function is operating, it will be canceled:

• The accelerator pedal depressed strongly.
• The steering wheel is turned sharply or abruptly."

I suspect that might be why it didn't activate in a couple of the instances where I triggered the warning.

There are 5 pages of dense text listing a couple hundred conditions where the system may fail to operate or may operate incorrectly.  The operating incorrectly bit is kind of terrifying, but I've never had this happe in practice.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I am going through my wife's new car manual now because I've had it apply the brakes while I was doing a moderately late lane change.

This could be an issue in the car but I've not heard of the 2023 Santa Fe having it be at a recall level.

Now on the subject of paranoia I'm always afraid the AEB would out brake the person behind me in a non AEB car.  I am sure this stems from the late 70s early 80s when I road motorcycles daily; back then braking distances for bikes was much shorter than cars of the day.