Sure, I'll try to make a video of my commute sometime in the near future. It is a decently dense stretch of I-495 (DC Beltway) and I-95, but it's also a reverse commute, which does help somewhat. Still nearly flawless. On a few interventions needed, typically right near a tricky exit to my work, right at the end. Sometimes it wants to get over too early on 495 to make the 95 exit, so I just cancel those on the screen.
I actually used to drive that particular area somewhat regularly (10x year or so) a while back... and man, I could not imagine trusting NoA in its current state to handle things there. Unless it's just dense traffic where it has no opportunity or reason to even suggest a lane change (seems likely given the location). In that case, you're just using lane keeping anyway, which after 3 years of development is finally mostly usable on highways with AP2+, and isn't NoA.
For NoA to be even close to "flawless", IMO it'd need to do at least the following:
- Hold the lane well while conforming to traffic ahead (normal AP + TACC)
- Make and execute sane lane change decisions without delay (as in, I should never have to cancel one)
- Make lane changes to overtake without decelerating, and not merging to the new lane at a speed lower than the current flow of traffic in the target lane.
- Never attempt or suggest a lane change into an obstacle (it does this frequently in my testing)
- No unnecessary braking (the phantom braking issue is very real, and a huge issue in every vehicle I've tested NoA in)
- Take the correct exits/interchanges as needed for a route without error and in a timely manner (merging to the right to be in the correct lane 3 miles before an exit, slowing pace by 20 MPH to do so, is not flawless)
- I shouldn't have to question every decision it attempts to make as if I'm stressfully babysitting a teenage student driver. The decisions it makes should make sense in the vast majority of cases.
- For example, I shouldn't have to override a decision within the first few minutes of engaging NoA, which is pretty common. In fact, I override lane changes it tries to make about 2/3 times in practice. This does not up my confidence in the system at all.
Probably many more, but you get the idea. Also, to be truly useful, it can not require hands on the wheel before executing decisions. This just introduces a delay that needs to be avoided, even if hands are already on the wheel. In the real world, that delay can be the difference in a safe and sane execution of a decision, or complete failure to do so.
If I were so inclined, I could quite easily just setup a few GoPros and make a massive compilation of NoA fails with very overall few miles required to do so. It really does astound me that people are singing such high praises for this feature in its current state.
Considering it has barely improved at all since my first post in this thread, I'm inclined to believe that the point of diminishing returns on development with the existing hardware/software is probably already passed (possibly before even being released), and it'll take exponentially longer to actually make this a truly useful feature. I hope I'm wrong, but the evidence is definitely not in favor of much upcoming improvement.
