Try it in very slow and in particular stop-and-go traffic. The acceleration curve is very smooth and predictable and makes these conditions a lot less stressful.
Even if you aren't the sort to accelerate heavily most of the time, it's useful to have the ability. I've been in a handful of situations where quick acceleration has saved me from a potentially fatal outcome. Both instances involved things falling from flatbed trailers that would gone through my windshield like a hot knife through butter. One was a large poly storage tank whose strap broke, bouncing off the trailer and into traffic before going off the side of a bridge (it was surprisingly bouncy); the other involved square steel tubes that weren't secured in a niche under the trailer. They slid out the side as I was overtaking the truck at the end of a gradual turn on the interstate just as I was coming beside them. In both instances, because of how things played out, slowing--the normal impulse--would have likely put me right smack in their way.
Stupid truck operators who don't know how to secure things aside, even in normal traffic it's useful. Just look at most on-ramps in the US compared to on the autobahn. Even most of the longer ones can require quick acceleration to safely merge. Especially in traffic. I still remember my first trip to LA and the shit rental car I had the "pleasure" of driving. Had I gotten out and pushed, I'd probably have gotten up to the speed of traffic faster. That said, the Model 3 at a 5.6 second 0-60 time is above average. It might not be a match for the higher-end Model S variants, but most people won't have any issues with it.
A violent uncontrolled stop like that would be hard to get your bearings for the next burst of acceleration. Also a continuous acceleration along a curve is likely going to be faster regardless.
This is true, the car can panic stop very quicky. The problem is I want to leave enough space to dodge pot holes that the car in front of me just drove over, since Autopilot can't really do anything about that (nor do I expect it to)
This space also enables you to time the lights, so you do less accelerating/decelerating, and increases your buffer for breaking, so driving is safer and less stressful.
Thanks! Yeah, for sure. It makes the absolute speed of the vehicle less important too, which is great for safety. If you have other objectives besides just crossing the finish line, you're not worried about how fast you're going. In fact, in some cases, you wish you could go more slowly.
Yes up to a point where it gives up and asks the driver to take back the wheel.
But at this point you really see nothing and you'll limit your speed to 10-40 km/h by yourself.
I used it in those situation on my tesla model 3 to be able to focus a maximum on the small visibility left as a driver, and with both hands strongly on the wheel and foot on the brake, low visibility is really dangerous and scary on the road.
Part of the issue is that you don't know what speed the car arriving behind you will have so where's your optimum speed? Too slow and rear ended by bad drivers, too fast and it won't go well.
It's fresh on my mind since I had such driving conditions two weeks ago on the highway. Trucks stayed at suicidal 90 km/h ...
that's a good example, not many situations like that near where I live.
that said, if I need to accelerate faster than my gti can handle at full throttle in 2nd/3rd gear, I will probably just wait for a bigger gap. everyone has their own tolerance for these things though; I play merges extra safe.
there definitely is such a curve. I just can't imagine its optimum is at 5+ seconds between cars, at least at the highway speeds we drive in dense/often congested areas (~60mph / 100kph where I live). Intuitively I'd put it around 3 seconds.
> And then after the car in front starts moving, it'd take them a solid second to start inching forward also.
Indeed, the most influential slider in the simulation seems to be the “max acceleration” one... if people accelerate quickly up to their max speed it seems to prevent traffic waves from propagating backwards. It meshes well with my observations 213929387 years ago when I used to drive in traffic.
My issue in traffic is that if someone gets between me and the car in front of me, the car hits the brakes to make some room. I’ve had it slow down from 50mph, from 75. It’s dangerous, if the person behind me isn’t paying attention, they could easily hit me. If I ever have it on in traffic my finger is on the switch to turn it off incase someone merges in front of me.
Of course, I use the max follow distance, so I have time to react if something happens and the car doesn’t do its job. I know some people who use the closest distance, which I guess would solve the merge issue, but would stress me out and if something happened, I’d be screwed.
But that alternative usually requires driving at higher speed, which more than cancels out any gains from avoiding stop and go because of the increased loss from drag and friction. There aren't any highways where you can drive 400 miles at 25 mph cruise.
Metcalf's description does say that he accelerated and decelerated very gently; see my edit to my upthread post. So he was trying to approach the ideal of driving at a steady 25 mph as close as he could. If the car's regen system had had lower losses, regen would have saved him some energy on those unavoidable decel/accel cycles.
You shouldn't even want to accelerate immediately at the same rate as the car in front of you, unless you're very optimistic about 1) having instant reflexes on the brake pedal even though your foot is currently on the gas pedal, and 2) your car's stopping distance being exactly the same as every other vehicle.
Having a time delay on your acceleration means that your following distance will increase as speed does, which is the safe behavior. I've had plenty of times when I thought "woo, we're accelerating, it's the end of the traffic jam!" and then had to hit the brakes when we came around a turn into more traffic. Traffic might be reduced if we all rode everyone's bumper all time time and accelerated as a single unit, but that doesn't mean we can actually do that without tons of collisions.
reply