Electric Vehicles: General topics

The full Driver's Assistance stack on the iX is pretty fantastic (lane positioning is pretty exact), I'd assume that it's close across the i-series vehicles.

Trip before last to Orlando, when we hit I-95 , I fired up the ADAS ("Highway Assistance") and got an extra notification about "Plus system now available for hands free". And sure enough, where the last trip where I used it (on v. 03/2024) it required hand contact on the wheel, with this latest update (07/2024) you can go completely hands free (as you might expect, requires "attention" by way of the cameras determining your eye/head position).

And that allows a bump of the turn signal, the car validates a clear lane, and executes the full lane change, does not disable anything. :)
 
Eric said:
One thing about the Tesla is you can use a cheat device (counterweight) on the steering wheel and it works great, you don't have to touch the wheel for an hour if you're just cruising on the freeway. However, what I've learned over the years is that either way I tend to have a hand on the wheel anyway so it's been pretty much rendered useless.

On the BMW you cannot cheat capacitive sensors the same way, you must be touching the wheel when it warns you but it's also more forgiving than the Tesla (at least during that time) and when you hit heavier traffic it gave you a much longer grace period to keep your hands off the wheel.

It feels like more thought was put into the way BMW handles things, of course they have been a car company for more than a century and understands how to refine these things, they didn't just slap an buggy touchscreen OS on top of a battery with wheels.
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I'm not sure if it is a "FSD" feature or if it works if you step it down to autopilot. You don't have to touch the wheel if you have an interior camera.
 
diamond.g said:
I'm not sure if it is a "FSD" feature or if it works if you step it down to autopilot. You don't have to touch the wheel if you have an interior camera.
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It will only allow hands off the wheel for a few seconds at a time regardless. From my experience the interior camera has turned into big brother x10, even with your hands on the wheel if you take your eyes off for the road even a few seconds the alarm sounds, and it's jarring when it does. This should be a tool to enable us to look away from the road for a bit, not one to penalize. What is the point then?

As a result I always just disengage and then look/reach for whatever I need like we used to do in the old days, yes swerving a bit but I try to keep it to a minimum and it's far safer than having alarms screaming at you and potentially disengaging mid-task. It has all the potential but is far too over-governing which renders it useless.
 
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Eric said:
It will only allow hands off the wheel for a few seconds at a time regardless. From my experience the interior camera has turned into big brother x10, even with your hands on the wheel if you take your eyes off for the road even a few seconds the alarm sounds, and it's jarring when it does. This should be a tool to enable us to look away from the road for a bit, not one to penalize. What is the point then?

As a result I always just disengage and then look/reach for whatever I need like we used to do in the old days, yes swerving a bit but I try to keep it to a minimum and it's far safer than having alarms screaming at you and potentially disengaging mid-task. It has all the potential but is far too over-governing which renders it useless.
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Yeah that isn’t my experience with FSD 12.5.4.2. I don’t have to touch the wheel. As long as I am looking forward the vehicle behaves just like BlueCruise or Supercruise.
 
diamond.g said:
Yeah that isn’t my experience with FSD 12.5.4.2. I don’t have to touch the wheel. As long as I am looking forward the vehicle behaves just like BlueCruise or Supercruise.
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except for the part where it crashes into stuff because it has no lidar.
 
I am annoyed I just got 12.5.6 this morning right as I dropped my car off to get service. The loaner is hardware 3, so I guess I won’t get to play with that update.
 
diamond.g said:
Yeah that isn’t my experience with FSD 12.5.4.2. I don’t have to touch the wheel. As long as I am looking forward the vehicle behaves just like BlueCruise or Supercruise.
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What model? My Model 3 forces you to put your hands on the wheel every so many seconds regardless, at least without a cheat device which I've stopped using anyway.
 
Eric said:
What model? My Model 3 forces you to put your hands on the wheel every so many seconds regardless, at least without a cheat device which I've stopped using anyway.
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Model 3. If you have your interior camera covered it reverts to wheel torque.
 
Cmaier said:
except for the part where it crashes into stuff because it has no lidar.
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It is not that so much as the logic is not built the right way. If the visual sees something unfamiliar, it says, eh, just keep going, rather than WTF is that? We better slow down / stop until we figure it out, like, you know, a human would.
 
Yoused said:
It is not that so much as the logic is not built the right way. If the visual sees something unfamiliar, it says, eh, just keep going, rather than WTF is that? We better slow down / stop until we figure it out, like, you know, a human would.
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For many of the crashes, it seemed it didn’t see anything. For example, I recall a crash or two involving a big rig perpendicular to the direction of travel, in front of a bright sky. White truck not properly distinguished from background sky by cameras.
 
Cmaier said:
For many of the crashes, it seemed it didn’t see anything. For example, I recall a crash or two involving a big rig perpendicular to the direction of travel, in front of a bright sky. White truck not properly distinguished from background sky by cameras.
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But there was also that one on a dirt road in Montana where the pilot kept complaining about the conditions, but it did not slow down. The Asian driver (it was a rental) did not speak very good English and might not have understood what the car was telling him. But, he told the car to go fast, and the pilot was not able to countermand his order for the conditions. This seems like a massive software flaw, which kind of relates to what I was talking about.

Yes, the thing with the trailer and the sky was bad. But you do not have to resort to lidar to solve that: just expand the cameras' optical frequency range into IR and perhaps UV, so that it has more clues for distinguishing things. Even just varying the ASA/DIN response of the sensors might help in the normal visual range.
 
Yoused said:
But there was also that one on a dirt road in Montana where the pilot kept complaining about the conditions, but it did not slow down. The Asian driver (it was a rental) did not speak very good English and might not have understood what the car was telling him. But, he told the car to go fast, and the pilot was not able to countermand his order for the conditions. This seems like a massive software flaw, which kind of relates to what I was talking about.

Yes, the thing with the trailer and the sky was bad. But you do not have to resort to lidar to solve that: just expand the cameras' optical frequency range into IR and perhaps UV, so that it has more clues for distinguishing things. Even just varying the ASA/DIN response of the sensors might help in the normal visual range.
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I'm not sure folks are ready for the car to ignore their input if the vehicle thinks things are unsafe.
 
diamond.g said:
I'm not sure folks are ready for the car to ignore their input if the vehicle thinks things are unsafe.
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I’m not sure I want the car ignoring my input when it has a tendency to randomly decide it needs to stop from highway speeds as it is. "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision" seems rather apt here.
 
I sure hope that, unlike the Cybertruck, the Cybercab has good crumple zones.
 
My car has "ProPilot". So far, I have not turned it on, because I am a luddite and prefer to operate the vehicle myself. She did prevent me from backing into a truck while parking, but that is about it. I have not had occasion to use cruise control, so I am not even sure how to activate it. I figure if she is not spending a lot of time doing my thinking, she will give me a little more range.
 
Yoused said:
My car has "ProPilot". So far, I have not turned it on, because I am a luddite and prefer to operate the vehicle myself. She did prevent me from backing into a truck while parking, but that is about it. I have not had occasion to use cruise control, so I am not even sure how to activate it. I figure if she is not spending a lot of time doing my thinking, she will give me a little more range.
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funny, i can’t remember the last time i used cruise control. must be years. I don’t think I’ve used it since 1996, when I used to have to drive back and forth two hours on the NY Thruway.
 
diamond.g said:
Model 3. If you have your interior camera covered it reverts to wheel torque.
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Just wanted to follow up and say thanks for pointing this out, I tested yesterday and that is exactly how it's working now and I had no idea. At night it didn't have enough light so it reverted (as you pointed out) but in the day it works fine.
 

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