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Honestly, I feel like a lot of the people complaining about this feature are just bad drivers who regularly drive unsafely and are now getting called out on it.

Honestly, I feel like a lot of the people complaining about this feature are just bad drivers who regularly drive unsafely and are now getting called out on it. This in particular: > Sometimes, though, I will allow the distance between myself and the next car to close, for example, if they're turning and will be gone in a second anyway. The Subaru then ruins my well-calculated slowdown maneuver by slamming on the brakes because it thinks I'm approaching the vehicle ahead of me too quickly. Well, yes, maybe, but they're also halfway out of the lane already so it's not terribly significant that I'm only one car-length away and still going 40 MPH. Another half-second and they'll be gone, restoring my follow distance. You really shouldn't be driving like that. You don't know if the car in front of you making that turn is going to brake suddenly, like because, I dunno, they suddenly see a pedestrian crossing on the side street. Personally, I'm a more reserved (I guess safer?) driver, and I always leave good following distance and brake predictably in order to do so, and I can't say I've had problems with these systems. And I'm 100% in favor of systems that force other drivers on the road to drive more safely as well. Now if only they could prevent tailgating entirely ...

branon 4y ago
That was just one example. I've clarified my original comment, previously I was using the term "car length" in a way that did not make sense to others. I should have said "seconds of follow distance" All of this is infinitely nuanced anyway. There might not be a side street. It can happen on the highway too when cars switch lanes to exit. And it's not like it happens every day, it's fairly rare, I just have yet to actually _need_ the car to do it, by a fairly wide margin. 1-2 car lengths (not in literal units of 15-feet each, I mean one or two _seconds_ of follow distance minimum after accounting for speed/traffic/weather) going the speed limit with my foot off the gas and over the brake, paying attention ready to slow down fast in case of a contingency feels very safe to me. Again, pretty nuanced, this only lasts for a handful of seconds while the lead car completes their maneuver. The salient point is that I already do what the machine tries to replicate, I don't need my maneuver clobbered by another system.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  I’m not comfortable at all claiming that you’re a bad driver in general, like the GP proposes, and maybe I’m taking your unit of measurement too literally, but I don’t think 1-2 car lengths is a reasonable follow distance in almost any circumstances above 45mph, two lengths is kinda the minimum to not bother the person in front of you. Again, I’m making a very general statement, that might not apply to the situations you’re describing. And I’m a young guy that is working on being a more conservative driver myself - so I’m chuckling to myself just at the idea of me taking this side of the discussion.
  - branon 4y ago
    This is an interesting point. The Subaru's adaptive cruise control system treats a "car length" as a fairly large unit of measurement. One car length seems to be the literal length of the vehicle, plus some reasonable amount of buffer on both ends. Probably twice as large as the vehicle itself. And the faster you're going, the larger a single car length becomes. Infinite nuance :P But in general, very good commentary on systems that provide useful feedback for the human operator versus ones that don't. ACC makes it clear what a car length should be, and if you're paying attention you can gauge how much more space it leaves when you're moving fast. So that's what I go by.
    - indymike 4y ago
      The Subaru uses two seconds per tick mark on the adaptive cruise display, so the distance changes as you go faster. At slow speeds, it's roughly exact car lengths, and at 65MPH it's considerably further.
    - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      Fwiw, it’s interesting to me that the unit of a “car length” would not refer to a literal car length (14-17 ft or so).
- berberous 4y ago
  Have you ever looked up stopping distances? https://www.automotive-fleet.com/driver-care/239402/driver-care-know-your-stopping-distance https://www.automotive-fleet.com/driver-care/239402/driver-c... I don’t know how accurate the above is, but it suggest that the stopping distance at 40mph is 5-9 car lengths, so I have to agree with the above poster that if you are routinely leaving one car length and your car system is freaking out, you are probably driving unsafely. Keep in my that statistically this could work out for you fine for 20+ years before one day you get into accident, and presumably blaming the driver who suddenly stopped mid turn. Check out watchpeopledie or idiotsincars for plenty of videos of what could go wrong. I recall one video of exactly this issue — an idiot SUV stopped mid turn in the middle of a lane, clearly a bad driver. And then another driver t-boned her because he didn’t have enough distance to stop, also cleary partially at fault IMO. I know people with lifelong pain from minor auto accidents. Don’t have that be you, or cause that for someone else. What do you lose by keeping some more space between you and the next car?
n8cpdx 4y ago
I used to have a roommate (who has several accidents on his record) with the exact same model of Toyota Corolla that I had. We’d frequently go on trips together. My driving experience: very rarely have a PCS audible warning when conditions change unexpectedly on the 10 (SoCal). Braking activated once or maybe twice in three years. His experience: constant “false” alarms from the system, several instances of pedestrians and vehicles “coming out of nowhere” that passenger saw 10+ seconds away, several instances of slamming on the brakes, both machine and human-activated. Some people just don’t treat driving as the life safety critical activity that it is. Most people.
tshaddox 4y ago
I tend to agree, especially in the situation described in that comment. I have a 2020 Subaru Outback that I believe has a very similar braking system, and while I have also experienced a small handful of false positives (especially when moving very slowly in a tight parking spot), I think the system is pretty good, and I do feel good about its ability to help at least a little bit if I ever really need it. I’m willing to ignore the false positives when moving very slowly in tight parking spaces. That’s startling and annoying, but doesn’t really bug me too much. I believe you can also turn that off independently of the forward-facing road-speed emergency braking feature (and you need to if you have a trailer or bike rack). As for false positives while at road speed, I think the actual brakes have only kicked in once or twice, and only very briefly (certainly not enough to slow me down so much that it could cause an accident). It’s a bit more common to get a false positive on the first stage of alert, which in my car is an audible alert and some red LEDs on the primitive heads up display.
- mint2 4y ago
  Anecdotally, I’ve found similar. Never had phantom breaking in my crosstrek. While it’s possible someone’s car could be miss calibrated, I’d guess pebkac is more likely and self reflection of driving habits is needed. The only object warnings I’ve triggered are completely understandable and never had auto braking A sharp turnning off-ramp to a rest stop on i5 with a sign in the middle that one drives directly at before turning has reliable triggered the object warning but never breaking. I suspect that if I went dangerously/stupidly fast in the turn it would brake. The other other time I could reliably trigger it was pulling in faster than usual to park head on 1 ft in front of a fence, and that only ever did the warning not braking. So far, and it’s anecdotal yes, I’ve never had it happen when actually on the road. What I do find annoying is the cruise control starts to floor it when changing lanes if it sees the clear path down the lane line during the change.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    My experience is largely the same as yours. I've had the alert (no braking) several times on the highway during sharp corners or when coming up on slower traffic (when I've been totally aware, but probably coming in hotter than I oughta be). I've also had it trigger twice when entering my apartment building's parking garage. It has a very steep uphill ramp and a couple of times I must have approached it fast enough that it thinks I'm running at a wall. I also agree with the cruise control issue. The adaptive cruise control is very nice for highway traffic that's changing speeds a lot, except that I'll forget that it's set at 65-70 after cruising around 50 for a while, and then when it finds a clear lane it will try to accelerate very quickly. That's ultimately just a limitation in how far ahead the system looks to find cars.
giantg2 4y ago
"And I'm 100% in favor of systems that force other drivers on the road to drive more safely as well." Ug. I'd rather have testing be changed so that safety is increased in all situations by having a competent driver. Most of the situations being described here are simply poor choices on the part of one or more drivers. For real, who the hell is cutting through lanes of traffic and slamming on brakes because they will miss a turn? Best to remove these people than have them rely on a price of tech to save them in 1 situation but let them continue to be dangerous in another 9 areas.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  >Ug. I'd rather have testing be changed so that safety is increased in all situations by having a competent driver. This follows to taking driving license from them. You'd have to change USA more than Lincoln and Roosevelt together to remove critical dependency on cars there.
notacoward 4y ago
> You don't know if the car in front of you making that turn is going to brake suddenly More drivers need to be aware of this one. There's an intersection near me where drivers always tailgate and rush others through the (slightly greater than 90-degree) turn onto a side street, no matter how well the turn has been signaled already. There have been multiple minor accidents, but fortunately no pedestrians have been hit that I know of. When someone's turning, drivers behind need to give them more space not less.
meetingthrower 4y ago
100%. We drive Subarus, highway and city. Have NEVER had an emergency brake triggered. OP is unsafe.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Maybe? Few would openly admit to be a bad driver to begin with so it is hard to even get anecdata on the subject. In other words, I am not sure you can determine an answer either. What I can say is what bothers me about it. Can I turn it off? Can toggle on/off switch be disabled by an update? Can I trust that it the off button will do what it is supposed to do? If I can do those things, can I trust this feature to work as advertised? I used to not ask questions like that with cars as there was certain level of.. expectation that this machine has to work in sometimes drastically radical conditions ( especially in some parts of US ). Cars are software now. But that is not my main beef with it. My beef is that it is built to the detriment of the end user and to strip the user of all control.
lostmsu 4y ago
> You really shouldn't be driving like that. You don't know if the car in front of you making that turn is going to brake suddenly, like because, I dunno, they suddenly see a pedestrian crossing on the side street. I think that's the problem with that attitude and why I don't like my car doing excessive braking. Unlike the distance lidar, I can actually see there's nothing obstructing the turning driver, and I can see their speed of leaving the lane is simply too high for them to stop before leaving the lane even if they slam the brakes. And even if they did somehow manage to break where they are already I'd only need a little swerve to the left to drive around with no traffic there etc

branon 4y ago

That was just one example. I've clarified my original comment, previously I was using the term "car length" in a way that did not make sense to others. I should have said "seconds of follow distance" All of this is infinitely nuanced anyway. There might not be a side street. It can happen on the highway too when cars switch lanes to exit. And it's not like it happens every day, it's fairly rare, I just have yet to actually _need_ the car to do it, by a fairly wide margin. 1-2 car lengths (not in literal units of 15-feet each, I mean one or two _seconds_ of follow distance minimum after accounting for speed/traffic/weather) going the speed limit with my foot off the gas and over the brake, paying attention ready to slow down fast in case of a contingency feels very safe to me. Again, pretty nuanced, this only lasts for a handful of seconds while the lead car completes their maneuver. The salient point is that I already do what the machine tries to replicate, I don't need my maneuver clobbered by another system.

DiggyJohnson 4y ago
I’m not comfortable at all claiming that you’re a bad driver in general, like the GP proposes, and maybe I’m taking your unit of measurement too literally, but I don’t think 1-2 car lengths is a reasonable follow distance in almost any circumstances above 45mph, two lengths is kinda the minimum to not bother the person in front of you. Again, I’m making a very general statement, that might not apply to the situations you’re describing. And I’m a young guy that is working on being a more conservative driver myself - so I’m chuckling to myself just at the idea of me taking this side of the discussion.
- branon 4y ago
  This is an interesting point. The Subaru's adaptive cruise control system treats a "car length" as a fairly large unit of measurement. One car length seems to be the literal length of the vehicle, plus some reasonable amount of buffer on both ends. Probably twice as large as the vehicle itself. And the faster you're going, the larger a single car length becomes. Infinite nuance :P But in general, very good commentary on systems that provide useful feedback for the human operator versus ones that don't. ACC makes it clear what a car length should be, and if you're paying attention you can gauge how much more space it leaves when you're moving fast. So that's what I go by.
  - indymike 4y ago
    The Subaru uses two seconds per tick mark on the adaptive cruise display, so the distance changes as you go faster. At slow speeds, it's roughly exact car lengths, and at 65MPH it's considerably further.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Fwiw, it’s interesting to me that the unit of a “car length” would not refer to a literal car length (14-17 ft or so).
berberous 4y ago
Have you ever looked up stopping distances? https://www.automotive-fleet.com/driver-care/239402/driver-care-know-your-stopping-distance https://www.automotive-fleet.com/driver-care/239402/driver-c... I don’t know how accurate the above is, but it suggest that the stopping distance at 40mph is 5-9 car lengths, so I have to agree with the above poster that if you are routinely leaving one car length and your car system is freaking out, you are probably driving unsafely. Keep in my that statistically this could work out for you fine for 20+ years before one day you get into accident, and presumably blaming the driver who suddenly stopped mid turn. Check out watchpeopledie or idiotsincars for plenty of videos of what could go wrong. I recall one video of exactly this issue — an idiot SUV stopped mid turn in the middle of a lane, clearly a bad driver. And then another driver t-boned her because he didn’t have enough distance to stop, also cleary partially at fault IMO. I know people with lifelong pain from minor auto accidents. Don’t have that be you, or cause that for someone else. What do you lose by keeping some more space between you and the next car?

n8cpdx 4y ago

I used to have a roommate (who has several accidents on his record) with the exact same model of Toyota Corolla that I had. We’d frequently go on trips together. My driving experience: very rarely have a PCS audible warning when conditions change unexpectedly on the 10 (SoCal). Braking activated once or maybe twice in three years. His experience: constant “false” alarms from the system, several instances of pedestrians and vehicles “coming out of nowhere” that passenger saw 10+ seconds away, several instances of slamming on the brakes, both machine and human-activated. Some people just don’t treat driving as the life safety critical activity that it is. Most people.

tshaddox 4y ago

I tend to agree, especially in the situation described in that comment. I have a 2020 Subaru Outback that I believe has a very similar braking system, and while I have also experienced a small handful of false positives (especially when moving very slowly in a tight parking spot), I think the system is pretty good, and I do feel good about its ability to help at least a little bit if I ever really need it. I’m willing to ignore the false positives when moving very slowly in tight parking spaces. That’s startling and annoying, but doesn’t really bug me too much. I believe you can also turn that off independently of the forward-facing road-speed emergency braking feature (and you need to if you have a trailer or bike rack). As for false positives while at road speed, I think the actual brakes have only kicked in once or twice, and only very briefly (certainly not enough to slow me down so much that it could cause an accident). It’s a bit more common to get a false positive on the first stage of alert, which in my car is an audible alert and some red LEDs on the primitive heads up display.

mint2 4y ago
Anecdotally, I’ve found similar. Never had phantom breaking in my crosstrek. While it’s possible someone’s car could be miss calibrated, I’d guess pebkac is more likely and self reflection of driving habits is needed. The only object warnings I’ve triggered are completely understandable and never had auto braking A sharp turnning off-ramp to a rest stop on i5 with a sign in the middle that one drives directly at before turning has reliable triggered the object warning but never breaking. I suspect that if I went dangerously/stupidly fast in the turn it would brake. The other other time I could reliably trigger it was pulling in faster than usual to park head on 1 ft in front of a fence, and that only ever did the warning not braking. So far, and it’s anecdotal yes, I’ve never had it happen when actually on the road. What I do find annoying is the cruise control starts to floor it when changing lanes if it sees the clear path down the lane line during the change.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  My experience is largely the same as yours. I've had the alert (no braking) several times on the highway during sharp corners or when coming up on slower traffic (when I've been totally aware, but probably coming in hotter than I oughta be). I've also had it trigger twice when entering my apartment building's parking garage. It has a very steep uphill ramp and a couple of times I must have approached it fast enough that it thinks I'm running at a wall. I also agree with the cruise control issue. The adaptive cruise control is very nice for highway traffic that's changing speeds a lot, except that I'll forget that it's set at 65-70 after cruising around 50 for a while, and then when it finds a clear lane it will try to accelerate very quickly. That's ultimately just a limitation in how far ahead the system looks to find cars.

giantg2 4y ago

"And I'm 100% in favor of systems that force other drivers on the road to drive more safely as well." Ug. I'd rather have testing be changed so that safety is increased in all situations by having a competent driver. Most of the situations being described here are simply poor choices on the part of one or more drivers. For real, who the hell is cutting through lanes of traffic and slamming on brakes because they will miss a turn? Best to remove these people than have them rely on a price of tech to save them in 1 situation but let them continue to be dangerous in another 9 areas.

KptMarchewa 4y ago
>Ug. I'd rather have testing be changed so that safety is increased in all situations by having a competent driver. This follows to taking driving license from them. You'd have to change USA more than Lincoln and Roosevelt together to remove critical dependency on cars there.

notacoward 4y ago

> You don't know if the car in front of you making that turn is going to brake suddenly More drivers need to be aware of this one. There's an intersection near me where drivers always tailgate and rush others through the (slightly greater than 90-degree) turn onto a side street, no matter how well the turn has been signaled already. There have been multiple minor accidents, but fortunately no pedestrians have been hit that I know of. When someone's turning, drivers behind need to give them more space not less.

meetingthrower 4y ago

100%. We drive Subarus, highway and city. Have NEVER had an emergency brake triggered. OP is unsafe.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

Maybe? Few would openly admit to be a bad driver to begin with so it is hard to even get anecdata on the subject. In other words, I am not sure you can determine an answer either. What I can say is what bothers me about it. Can I turn it off? Can toggle on/off switch be disabled by an update? Can I trust that it the off button will do what it is supposed to do? If I can do those things, can I trust this feature to work as advertised? I used to not ask questions like that with cars as there was certain level of.. expectation that this machine has to work in sometimes drastically radical conditions ( especially in some parts of US ). Cars are software now. But that is not my main beef with it. My beef is that it is built to the detriment of the end user and to strip the user of all control.

lostmsu 4y ago

> You really shouldn't be driving like that. You don't know if the car in front of you making that turn is going to brake suddenly, like because, I dunno, they suddenly see a pedestrian crossing on the side street. I think that's the problem with that attitude and why I don't like my car doing excessive braking. Unlike the distance lidar, I can actually see there's nothing obstructing the turning driver, and I can see their speed of leaving the lane is simply too high for them to stop before leaving the lane even if they slam the brakes. And even if they did somehow manage to break where they are already I'd only need a little swerve to the left to drive around with no traffic there etc