Tesla is hardly the only company that makes a car with lane following and adaptive cruise control. How do the other manufacturers deal with this issue?
I have a car with the "autopilot" feature like the Tesla, but they call it adaptive cruise control and lane assist. The adaptive cruise control works pretty well; I guess it only needs to check the radar to see what's in front to slow down. The lane assist is problematic in recognizing different kind of lanes and would steer off course from time to time. I guess the current state of "autopilot" technology is simply not there.
Based on all the information I've seen, adaptive cruise control with lane keeping is all that Tesla is reliable at as well. The main difference between them and Mercedes is that Tesla is willing to put out tech that is known to be unreliable and let their customers take the fall for it.
I think Tesla is losing out here by calling what is little more than adaptive cruise control plus lanekeeping "autopilot." Adaptive cruise control + lanekeeping + collision avoidance is available on a ton of cars now, even economy cars, and it works great. I regularly make a ~200 mile drive on the Honda system and it is 100% the whole way. But when you sell it as Autopilot instead of driver assist, people have much higher expectations and blame your car rather than the driver - though there very well could be serious problems with the Tesla implementation.
Lanekeeping is actually very nice. The system in Teslas and most (all?) others do require you to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention, but having to constantly manually steer the car is much more fatiguing than you would think. It's really annoying to drive cars without lanekeeping now.
Have you tried it? I recently got my first car that has adaptive cruise control and “lane-keep assist,” which is essentially what Tesla calls “autopilot,” and it’s really great even with its limitations and flaws. Yes, you need to remain alert, and it doesn’t do everything for you, but it still does some things for you. I’m not sure what’s difficult to understand.
I recently drove a BMW 750i with lane-following on a long trip and then he lane-following feature was terrifying. It seemed like it was doing the most brain dead line-following algorithm that made it “bounce” back and forth between the left and right sides of the lane. I couldn’t stop worrying that it was freaking out the other cars around me by careening towards them and yanking back in the other direction at the last moment. I sure hope Tesla autopilot is better than that.
At least for my use cases, I think Ford actually has an edge over Autopilot. Any car with adaptive cruise control and autosteering is gonna behave identically to a Tesla with autopilot for 99% of the time behind the wheel. Ford doesn't do lane changes or summoning, but from what I've seen both of those features have some jank with Tesla and I wouldn't use them.
The big pro of Ford's system is that on some highways/freeways the cruise control is actually hands free. IIRC Teslas have torque sensors in the steering wheel to make sure that your hands don't wander.
Tesla is trying to catch up to other manufacturers here: Mercedes has sold cars with lane assist (preventing drifting out of lane) since 2009 and Ford has a self-parallel-parking system for a while.
Right, and other cars have lane keeping too. Tesla's implementation of both is the best out there, but mainly because they're less timid about it. Other manufacturers feel compelled to force you to keep your hands on the wheel and such, even when the technology doesn't require it.
Maybe the biggest problem is Tesla calling it autopilot. Just call it lane assist or adaptive cruise control. I know many of the cars will stop working if you take your hands off the wheel too long.
If you just want a car that drives itself on freeways, get a Tesla. Probably 80% of my car's 15,000 miles have been on autopilot. It automatically changes lanes to pass and automatically gets out of the passing lane afterwards. It takes offramps and interchanges. It automatically brakes for obstacles. It aborts lane changes if someone else gets in the way. It even works in rain and light snow.
Other car companies are a few years behind, but even something as simple as adaptive cruise control + lane centering is a huge help on freeways.
Just to nitpick: Tesla is, in fact, not at all far ahead of other auto manufacturers in terms of autonomous driving tech. At CES this year, pretty much everyone showed off significant achievements in their own self-driving cars, including fully autonomous road trips. Autopilot is basically the same as adaptive cruise control + traffic jam assist, both of which have been available in some vehicles (Audi comes to mind) for years.
The difference is that the bigger OEMs are extremely wary of enabling these features in cars and getting into lawsuits as a result. Tesla has shown repeatedly with things like a giant touch screen that flaunts NHTSA guidelines that it just doesn't care about potential legal problems, and is more than happy to put somewhat unproven tech in the hands of drivers and hope for the best.
As I understand it, other auto manufacturers provide similar capability, though they may call it "lane keeping" instead of "autopilot".
What I haven't seen discussed: Are these cars from other manufacturers having similar problems with crashing into things? Are Tesla crashes considered more newsworthy, which is why we hear more about them? Or are drivers of these other cars more attentive? Or do these other cars actually have better technology?
Just curious why the discussion is always Tesla "autopilot" vs Waymo "full autonomy" vs unaided humans, when other manufacturers are also putting level-2 "lane keeping" systems on the road.
Cruise control is as far from autonomous driving as a piece of graph paper is from being a computer. Nobody has ever described it as a paradigm shift, and its invention did not prompt unsubstantiated speculation about how driverless taxicabs are literally two years away. And yes, from a safety perspective, Tesla's autopilot is no different from cruise control. Keep your hands on the wheel, your feet on the pedals, and constantly pay attention.
Why are you assuming that other manufacturers are not working towards full autonomy? I strongly doubt that everyone at Ford, GM, VW, Toyota, and Honda is asleep at the wheel... Especially when their luxury vehicles are all incrementally moving towards autonomy.
They certainly have a lot fewer PR pieces about how amazing their autonomous-but-not-really lane assist is.
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