Anecdata: I have a 2022 Prius with radar cruise control and lane guidance. During my first road trip, I discovered that the lane guidance actually did steering

Anecdata: I have a 2022 Prius with radar cruise control and lane guidance. During my first road trip, I discovered that the lane guidance actually did steering through curves (I don’t know how tight it handles, but certainly, it handles the kind of curves that are typical of interstate-level highways.¹ Similarly, the cruise control will slow the car down to a full stop if necessary. Of course, while magical by the standards of my previous cars, it’s still rudimentary. It doesn’t do a good job of catching people merging in front of me and slowing down appropriately and while I often use it on surface streets as well (giving me more consistent acceleration and better gas milage), it will happily drive right through a stop sign or red light if there’s no car in front of me coming to a stop. This puts the automation into the danger valley between manual operation and pushing a button in an elevator. Really, anything short of elevator-level automation, especially without high-level training (consider the accidents that happen with jet autopilot even with that training) is ultimately going to be more dangerous on balance because it can lull the operator into a false sense of complacency. ⸻ 1. It also gets very upset if it detects your hands not on the wheel as I discovered when I decided to see if the car really was steering itself through the curves.