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I recently used a rental that had GMs "adaptive cruise" and it was mostly awesome even in dense traffic. There were two main issues that had to do with followi

I recently used a rental that had GMs "adaptive cruise" and it was mostly awesome even in dense traffic. There were two main issues that had to do with following distance. 1: I had it set to 80mph and the other cars in the hov lanes on I-80 were going 75-80 and I was impressed how the car maintained a relatively safe following distance. This seems to irritate the other drivers and I would have tailgaters and eventually people would pass me on the right to occupy the space in front of me causing the car to slow down to get back to a safe following distance, causing the tailgaters to receive an autonomous brake check. 2: In slower traffic around 30mph (still set to 80) that same safe following distance allowed other drivers to cut me off, and several times the brakes engaged hard when the collision detector was activated. The first time that happened I was not prepared and I barely got my foot to the brake pedal in time. I decided after the second time that happened to turn it off as the time it took initialize my foot press the brake was too long, that when I was actively pressing the gas/brakes I could react much quicker to traffic.

ben_jones 8y ago
I wonder if we can't take all these advanced sensors for self-driving and use them to help LEO fairly detect unsafe driving in order to increase mean driver safety. Ironically the parent was probably technically going over the speed limit, though everyone goes over the speed limit there. Whoever builds automated traffic violation software would need to be very fairhanded in order to not upset the status quo.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  There is an Israeli startup that does this (using machine vision and freely issued iPhones to rideshare drivers; the name escapes me at the moment, I apologize) to provide data to insurance companies for better pricing of auto insurance rates. I'm not sure I want to live in a future where my Tesla is a mobile sensor platform for someone else's benefit besides myself and Tesla, although I can see the allure of negating the need for LEO patrols on road infrastructure once a critical mass of sensor platform vehicles is reached in an area. This would require a herculean amount of governance and transparency to be okay with me, and I would expect more sanity in road legislation (higher reasonable top speeds, for example) as well.
  - thrownblown 8y ago
    Is it nexar? https://www.getnexar.com https://www.getnexar.com
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      Yes, thanks.
- thrownblown 8y ago
  I'm in Hawaii RN and the speed limit on the interstate here is 45 - 55! It's bizarre world compared to bay area interstate driving.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    The speed limit is irrelevant. What's the community accepted reasonable speed? I would wager that it's not much different than the same highway conditions elsewhere.
    - thrownblown 8y ago
      people drive the speed limit here. its a much different driving culture than the mainland and it helps that speeding is aggressively ticketed.
  - sib 8y ago
    There's also the fact that there are only 4 Interstate highways in Hawaii totaling 54.9 miles, while in California, there are 25 Interstates totaling 2,455.7 miles. So, we've got more space to get up to speed ;) and, of course, longer distances to travel...
dreamcompiler 8y ago
I had the same issues in a Tesla. I adjusted the following distance down to dissuade people from jumping in front of me, but that felt even more unsafe. Seemed like there was no good solution.
- vkou 8y ago
  The solution is to get people to stop being assholes on the road. Fine tailgaters. I care about the safety issues caused by them a lot more then I do about people going 6 over the limit. Following any closer then 2 seconds of traveling distance on a clear, dry day, 3 seconds at night, or in the rain, 4 seconds on a rainy night should be considered reckless driving.
  - mattferderer 8y ago
    I feel like driving cars turns most people into idiots, myself included at times.
    - Balgair 8y ago
      I don't have the citation, but I remember this quote: "The easiest way to make people stupid is to limit their degrees of freedom" Cars really only have 2 degrees of freedom: linear acceleration and radial acceleration. In traffic, these DoFs go down by a lot. You ability to de/accelerate linearly is very limited by the cars behind you and in front of you. Your turning also goes down to nearly a binary choice of 1 lane left/right. Get people 4-wheeling and the stupid is very much still there, but just to get back to a main road, you have to use your noggin a fair bit more. Folks tend to think things through and weight choices more.
      - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        Are the horn and middle finger(s) not also degrees of freedom?
        Balgair 8y ago
UweSchmidt 8y ago
The solution would be to detect attempts at cutting you off and automatically close the gap momentarily to discourage this behavior. Ideally your autonomous car would also take part in the community of tailgaters and communicate forward that the current speed is unacceptable if this is the consensus of several tailgating vehicles, and gently reduce distance in a controlled way until the car in front gives in and speeds up or yields.
- Chris_Chambers 8y ago
  Your blind optimism is what will continue to kill people. I never consented to sharing the road with non-human entities that don’t fear death.
- forbiddenvoid 8y ago
  This is basically the opposite of the ideal solution. The solution is to remove dangerous drivers from having control of 2-ton deathtraps, not contributing to the same behavior that is causing the problem. Opportunistic, unsafe behavior is exactly the reason we need autonomous vehicles, rather than human-controlled vehicles.
- freehunter 8y ago
  What you're describing is a car that eschews defensive driving in favor of offensive driving. Speeding up to keep people from cutting in front of you only works until the other driver doesn't see (or doesn't care) and now you're in a crash. Or traffic suddenly slows as you're speeding up to close the gap, and now you can't respond quickly enough and now you're in a crash. Letting someone cut you off and slowing to return to a safe following distance is by far the safer option. There's a reason it's called a safe following distance. Anything closer and you cannot stop in time. Even temporarily. Especially when autonomous cars in front of you may be suddenly braking as well.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    Safer from the minimizing personal liability perspective. If cutting people off is a valid tactic because they bend over and take it then more people will do it more of the time and that makes everyone less safe. We don't negotiate with terrorists for a reason.
jsgo 8y ago
I used a Honda Accord with a similar system and even had a similar experience to scenario 1 on the interstate (though I was set at 69). After I realized that the following distance control was the reason the car was going slower, I was initially fine with it, but then someone cut me off which then forced me to driving slower resulting in me turning off the system. I have a feeling these systems won't really be great until all cars are using them and considering I don't see that happening, I don't see them gaining a ton of traction, unfortunately.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  Don't cruise in the passing lane, that's bad form.
  - jsgo 8y ago
    I wasn't? They passed on my left side?
    - linuxftw 8y ago
      My mistake. Yeah, people easing over from the left lane going slower than you or just in front of you is annoying. The only real way to combat this is to make them commit to going faster than you by speeding up, or going slower than you by keeping them boxed in. All in all, sounds possible like not great cruise conditions, which is pretty much all the time in most metro areas now.
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> There were two main issues that had to do with following distance. The trouble seems to be that they're being too conservative. Following distance is what it is because of human reaction times. You have to process the input with your brain, decide what to do, move your foot, then the car starts to slow down. In principle a computer can do it faster and so doesn't need as much space. Moreover, everybody would like following distance to be dictated by safety, but in practice it's dictated by traffic volume. If you have traffic averaging three car lengths between each car and then twice as many cars merge into the highway, either you end up with one car length between each car, or you end up with stopped traffic. There is no third option. The problem right now is that they're still using the human driver as a backup, so using the safe-for-computers following distance doesn't mesh with that, but using the safe-for-humans distance is a violation of standard behavior. So they're stuck choosing between the unsafe thing everybody does, or the "safe" thing that then becomes unsafe anyway because of how everyone else reacts to it.
cozzyd 8y ago
Why does it let you speed?
- thrownblown 8y ago
  going 75-80 on I-80 isn't speeding. that's the pace of traffic even in the slow lanes. people do slow to like 70-75 if there is a highway patrol car nearby but since speed limits aren't really enforced 80 is the de-facto limit. and since cars are no longer the greatest cause of death in the US, they gotta let it go to cull the herd a bit and get that death rate up. (/s)
lostapathy 8y ago
We have a Honda with similar system. It can be annoying in heavy traffic, but wow is it amazing on long drives between cities. There's no more fighting the cruise control when you and the vehicle in ahead are a little out of sync speed wise - either due to 75mph being a little different in each or due to performance differences on hills. On the whole, I find a 3+ hour drive a lot less stressful with the adaptive cruise control, and I arrive feeling much less fatigued.

ben_jones 8y ago

I wonder if we can't take all these advanced sensors for self-driving and use them to help LEO fairly detect unsafe driving in order to increase mean driver safety. Ironically the parent was probably technically going over the speed limit, though everyone goes over the speed limit there. Whoever builds automated traffic violation software would need to be very fairhanded in order to not upset the status quo.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
There is an Israeli startup that does this (using machine vision and freely issued iPhones to rideshare drivers; the name escapes me at the moment, I apologize) to provide data to insurance companies for better pricing of auto insurance rates. I'm not sure I want to live in a future where my Tesla is a mobile sensor platform for someone else's benefit besides myself and Tesla, although I can see the allure of negating the need for LEO patrols on road infrastructure once a critical mass of sensor platform vehicles is reached in an area. This would require a herculean amount of governance and transparency to be okay with me, and I would expect more sanity in road legislation (higher reasonable top speeds, for example) as well.
- thrownblown 8y ago
  Is it nexar? https://www.getnexar.com https://www.getnexar.com
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Yes, thanks.
thrownblown 8y ago
I'm in Hawaii RN and the speed limit on the interstate here is 45 - 55! It's bizarre world compared to bay area interstate driving.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  The speed limit is irrelevant. What's the community accepted reasonable speed? I would wager that it's not much different than the same highway conditions elsewhere.
  - thrownblown 8y ago
    people drive the speed limit here. its a much different driving culture than the mainland and it helps that speeding is aggressively ticketed.
- sib 8y ago
  There's also the fact that there are only 4 Interstate highways in Hawaii totaling 54.9 miles, while in California, there are 25 Interstates totaling 2,455.7 miles. So, we've got more space to get up to speed ;) and, of course, longer distances to travel...

dreamcompiler 8y ago

I had the same issues in a Tesla. I adjusted the following distance down to dissuade people from jumping in front of me, but that felt even more unsafe. Seemed like there was no good solution.

vkou 8y ago
The solution is to get people to stop being assholes on the road. Fine tailgaters. I care about the safety issues caused by them a lot more then I do about people going 6 over the limit. Following any closer then 2 seconds of traveling distance on a clear, dry day, 3 seconds at night, or in the rain, 4 seconds on a rainy night should be considered reckless driving.
- mattferderer 8y ago
  I feel like driving cars turns most people into idiots, myself included at times.
  - Balgair 8y ago
    I don't have the citation, but I remember this quote: "The easiest way to make people stupid is to limit their degrees of freedom" Cars really only have 2 degrees of freedom: linear acceleration and radial acceleration. In traffic, these DoFs go down by a lot. You ability to de/accelerate linearly is very limited by the cars behind you and in front of you. Your turning also goes down to nearly a binary choice of 1 lane left/right. Get people 4-wheeling and the stupid is very much still there, but just to get back to a main road, you have to use your noggin a fair bit more. Folks tend to think things through and weight choices more.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      Are the horn and middle finger(s) not also degrees of freedom?
      - Balgair 8y ago

UweSchmidt 8y ago

The solution would be to detect attempts at cutting you off and automatically close the gap momentarily to discourage this behavior. Ideally your autonomous car would also take part in the community of tailgaters and communicate forward that the current speed is unacceptable if this is the consensus of several tailgating vehicles, and gently reduce distance in a controlled way until the car in front gives in and speeds up or yields.

Chris_Chambers 8y ago
Your blind optimism is what will continue to kill people. I never consented to sharing the road with non-human entities that don’t fear death.
forbiddenvoid 8y ago
This is basically the opposite of the ideal solution. The solution is to remove dangerous drivers from having control of 2-ton deathtraps, not contributing to the same behavior that is causing the problem. Opportunistic, unsafe behavior is exactly the reason we need autonomous vehicles, rather than human-controlled vehicles.
freehunter 8y ago
What you're describing is a car that eschews defensive driving in favor of offensive driving. Speeding up to keep people from cutting in front of you only works until the other driver doesn't see (or doesn't care) and now you're in a crash. Or traffic suddenly slows as you're speeding up to close the gap, and now you can't respond quickly enough and now you're in a crash. Letting someone cut you off and slowing to return to a safe following distance is by far the safer option. There's a reason it's called a safe following distance. Anything closer and you cannot stop in time. Even temporarily. Especially when autonomous cars in front of you may be suddenly braking as well.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Safer from the minimizing personal liability perspective. If cutting people off is a valid tactic because they bend over and take it then more people will do it more of the time and that makes everyone less safe. We don't negotiate with terrorists for a reason.

jsgo 8y ago

I used a Honda Accord with a similar system and even had a similar experience to scenario 1 on the interstate (though I was set at 69). After I realized that the following distance control was the reason the car was going slower, I was initially fine with it, but then someone cut me off which then forced me to driving slower resulting in me turning off the system. I have a feeling these systems won't really be great until all cars are using them and considering I don't see that happening, I don't see them gaining a ton of traction, unfortunately.

linuxftw 8y ago
Don't cruise in the passing lane, that's bad form.
- jsgo 8y ago
  I wasn't? They passed on my left side?
  - linuxftw 8y ago
    My mistake. Yeah, people easing over from the left lane going slower than you or just in front of you is annoying. The only real way to combat this is to make them commit to going faster than you by speeding up, or going slower than you by keeping them boxed in. All in all, sounds possible like not great cruise conditions, which is pretty much all the time in most metro areas now.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

> There were two main issues that had to do with following distance. The trouble seems to be that they're being too conservative. Following distance is what it is because of human reaction times. You have to process the input with your brain, decide what to do, move your foot, then the car starts to slow down. In principle a computer can do it faster and so doesn't need as much space. Moreover, everybody would like following distance to be dictated by safety, but in practice it's dictated by traffic volume. If you have traffic averaging three car lengths between each car and then twice as many cars merge into the highway, either you end up with one car length between each car, or you end up with stopped traffic. There is no third option. The problem right now is that they're still using the human driver as a backup, so using the safe-for-computers following distance doesn't mesh with that, but using the safe-for-humans distance is a violation of standard behavior. So they're stuck choosing between the unsafe thing everybody does, or the "safe" thing that then becomes unsafe anyway because of how everyone else reacts to it.

cozzyd 8y ago

Why does it let you speed?

thrownblown 8y ago
going 75-80 on I-80 isn't speeding. that's the pace of traffic even in the slow lanes. people do slow to like 70-75 if there is a highway patrol car nearby but since speed limits aren't really enforced 80 is the de-facto limit. and since cars are no longer the greatest cause of death in the US, they gotta let it go to cull the herd a bit and get that death rate up. (/s)

lostapathy 8y ago

We have a Honda with similar system. It can be annoying in heavy traffic, but wow is it amazing on long drives between cities. There's no more fighting the cruise control when you and the vehicle in ahead are a little out of sync speed wise - either due to 75mph being a little different in each or due to performance differences on hills. On the whole, I find a 3+ hour drive a lot less stressful with the adaptive cruise control, and I arrive feeling much less fatigued.