sillydriver
Member
Thanks for the pointer. Here is what I think is the most interesting part, answering a question about the car steering itself when the driver has not turned autosteer on:
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"The full answer is sort of complex and nuanced and I think difficult to incorporate into an article, but I do my best here. So if Autosteer is not on, let say you are going around a sharp bend and there’s a metal guard railing or a post or some obstacle and there’s a sharp bend, if Autosteer is not on, the only logical thing to do is to only actuate the brakes at the last split second because it doesn’t know if you are actually going to hit the curb if you are distracted.
The assumption normally would be that the driver would actually take the curve and not actually power through whatever the object is outside of the sharp turn. It’s quite different with Autosteer on because Autosteer then knows what its predicted path is so it knows that it’s going to turn and it knows that it shouldn’t brake just because there’s an obstacle in front of you in a sharp turn – off the road in a sharp turn.
What it can actually do is scan ahead and see if there’s an obstacle on the road in its predicted path and in that case there’s much more time to brake – and can actually more likely come to a full stop. Let’s say that there’s a car or truck that is broken down or something on the road it can brake in a much more measured way and it is much more likely to reach a full stop and avoid hitting the object.
So it’s really gonna make a lot more sense to enable Autosteer than not enable Autosteer. Does that answer your question?
I should mention that there also one other element: even when Autosteer is not actually turned on, if the car is highly confident that you are really off the road, aren’t countering the free space violation, and you are going to hit something unless you turn – we will turn on the ability gradually to nudge the car at least mostly back onto the road so that at least you are not completely going off the road.
This will be a function that somebody can turn on or off. Do you want essentially “Emergency Autosteer”? In that scenario, it wouldn’t try to keep you within your lane lines, but it would keep you from veering you off the road."
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I wonder how many people here see this as a great thing vs. those who see it as more of a concern. I don't want to be a Luddite but I guess I fall a little bit into the second camp. Emergency situations are almost by definition non-standard and out of the ordinary, and I believe that a human driver, with much better visual interpretive abilities than a car, is better at choosing the right action to take in such situations than the car. I don't want to be fighting for control of the wheel with AP (or for control of the accelerator and brakes with TACC). I probably would not turn it the feature on (see his last line). Or maybe I'm overly concerned.
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