Adaptive cruise control / safety sense issue

When I saw the post about a Tesla that is when I knew this wasn't going anywhere useful. You are talking about a vehicle with an autonomous driving feature versus a car that has a radar controlled cruise feature. These are entirely different systems. You have overstated what Toyota is capable of, but that is fine, the problem is to state these are bugs is probably incorrect. You may say, and rightly so, that they are features you would like to see improved and adjusted to better meet your needs. Great, tell Toyota this, but if you go into a discussion with Toyota saying their system is broken, be prepared to have them shove the documentation back at you and close out their discussion.

But then, probably not what you want to hear, understand this is a shared forum, not yours, so we all can contribute if we wish.

 

I'm sure the performance could be improved somewhat with software changes but there are some inherent difficulties.

I don't think the camera is used in the normal DRCC but the sensors are fused for the safety stop.

When the range is short enough the radar signal from an obstacle will be stronger than would be reasonable for an overhead bridge or gantry so can be used to differentiate something in the path of the rather than above or below (there will also be returns from the ground that need to be considered - in radar parlance known as "Ground Clutter").

kevin

 

As far as I know the Tesla only has a similar type of radar technology as the Prius without any elevation sensing capability - at long range it cannot tell the difference between a bridge above the road and a stationery obstacle on the road- the only way is by their speed.

One approach Tesla is gradually bringing into the system is essentially crowdsourcing the information about obstacles - the first car to go past a previously unseen obstacle will proceed cautiously, e.g. slowing down when going into a tunnel or under a bridge, even though the optical and radar sensors will differ in their interpretation of the scene. If the car drives successfully past the object the information will be stored in the central map available to all cars. As confidence is built up other cars will use that information to take a more confident approach to the obstacle.

Yes the Toyota system is by no means an autonomous driving system but I don't know what you mean by "entirely different". They both have similar sensors some computation ability and the ability to control the car.

kevin

 

Marketing people LIE.
Nothing new there.
And that is "real information".

 

Here is what Toyota claims on their web page: Toyota Safety Sense

The road can be unpredictable. That’s why we created available Toyota Safety Sense™ 15: to help protect drivers, passengers and pedestrians (TSS-P only) from harm. Toyota Safety Sense™ (TSS) 15 is designed to help protect drivers, passengers, people in other vehicles on the road, and pedestrians (TSS-P and AHB). TSS is comprised of multi-feature active safety packages anchored by automated pre-collision warning and braking. TSS is designed to support the driver's awareness, decision-making and vehicle operation over a wide range of speeds under certain conditions. Packaged together in an integrated system, TSS features help address three key areas of accident protection: mitigating or preventing frontal collisions, helping to keep drivers within their lane, and enhancing road safety during nighttime driving. Always drive safely, obey traffic speed limits and laws, and focus on the road while driving.

TSS will be offered in the form of two packages: Toyota Safety Sense™ C (TSS-C) 15 for compact vehicles and Toyota Safety Sense™ P (TSS-P) 15 for midsize and large vehicles.
. . .
Toyota Safety Sense™ P 15 combines an in-vehicle camera and front-grille-mounted, millimeter-wave radar for enhanced performance and more functionality.
• Pre-Collision System 16 with Pedestrian Detection function 13 (PCS w/PD) —Vehicle Detection & Pedestrian Detection
• Lane Departure Alert with Steering Assist function (LDA w/SA) 17 (EPS-equipped vehicles)
• Automatic High Beams (AHB) 14
• Dynamic Radar Cruise Control (DRCC) 18

See Owner’s Manual for additional details on system operations, limitations, and precautions.​

There is an excellent PDF available from Toyota here: https://www.toyota.com/content/ebrochure/TSS_CFA_Final.pdf

The original poster apparently suffers from an inability or unwillingness to RTFM (Read The Fine Manual.) So I've provided both a URL and PDF that explains TSS-P and its limitations.

I encourage @xvs to contact an attorney who has dealt with Toyota in the past. A quick Google search reveals several addresses and contacts. The first, usually the best from Google, is:

Dimitrios Biller
LDT Consulting
15113 W Sunset Blvd Ste 9
Pacific Palisades, CA, 90272-3734
Office (310) 459-9870​

Also @xvs may need a skilled, Japanese translator:

Betsy Benjaminson
Betsy Benjaminson​

Betsy may be your best starting point as her blog indicates she continues to follow legal news about suing Toyota. No doubt she would be sympathetic to the @xvs complaint.

Bob Wilson

 

Okay then for clarity, these aren't the same at all. You are taking 2 singular components from Toyota and saying they match up to part of the Tesla system. That is like saying both have rubber tires. True they do. But that isn't the whole story. The Toyota system is a dynamic range detection and speed adjustment system. It is designed to essentially keep a safe distance from the vehicle in front and it uses only 2 components to do that, a radar sensor and a camera. The Tesla autonomous driving feature uses 8 cameras (7 more than Toyota), 12 ultrasonic sensors and a radar sensor to make decisions but on top of that it actually uses vision technology in a neural network device inside the car to essentially see the road and make AI type decisions on what it is seeing. It uses patterns to actually know what it is seeing. It has limitations, like the inability to properly detect kangaroos that are hopping, but it actually generally knows what it is seeing. The Toyota system doesn't even attempt to discern what is in front of it, just if it is moving away from you or if you are approaching it at an unsafe speed. A stationary object will throw the DRCC system off. So if a vehicle leaves the lane in front of you and the vehicle in front of it is not moving, this isn't what the system was designed for.

That said there are other safety features built into the car that should, when you get too close, kick in to take over this decision process. Unfortunately this can lead to a rather uncomfortable ride, because it wasn't the intended use of this function.

I was specifically referring to the fact that a Tesla autopilot video was shown, and that clearly uses many more sensors than the Toyota system has involved in this process.

While the vehicle does offer full range DRCC (meaning it can go down to zero) it is intended for use on highway speeds in general. It is good for rural highways where you may have some stops along the way due to lights along the road, but really isn't good for stop and go traffic where the road is heavily congested.

 

For Case 2, I recently drove on freeway with cruse set to 65 and cars would merge in from right slower than mine, and my car might slow a little. When that car got out of my lane, my car would go back to 65 even with no car ahead. I suspect the cancellation only takes place if the car is slower than 25 when the car leaves my lane with no car ahead, as the manual says it will do on page 402.

In my opinion, DRCC should never operate when the vehicle ahead is stopping at a stop sign. My reason is that when the preceding car starts up again, your car shouldn't just follow the car ahead but should first stop at the stop sign. Maybe this is why Toyota causes the system to shut off at low speeds, a situation where it is likely there are stop signs rather than stop lights.

 

So here is my $0.02:
- I recently drove a 2017 Honda CR-V which has LKAS and DRCC and it was a super impressive experience as the car basically drove itself - the DRCC followed well (like it does in Prius) but the LKAS basically kept the car centered in the lane and did all the steering, even around corners (on the highway)... all I had to do is hover my hands over the wheel and touch occasionally, but 99% of the time, it drove itself - now that was almost a true TESLA feeling... I came out IMPRESSED as it kept me nicely straight in the lane like a perfect driver and I wanted to try this out in a 2017 Prius.

- my disappointment is that I then had a chance to drive a 2017 Prius 4th Gen with DRRC and LDW with SA (Steering Assist)… so the “Steering Assist” part is what I expected to be similar to the LKAS in that it would attempt to “steer” back into the middle of the lane and perhaps ping back and forth between the left and the right part of the lane, keeping me roughly in the middle (the pinging back and forth is the difference between LKAS and LDW+SA, vs just keeping you nicely straight). Alas, nothing like that happened… what happened instead is that when I let it drift, the Prius detected I’m leaving the lane (beeped), I felt a slight nudge of the steering wheel back towards the lane, but the nudge was so soft, it didn’t actually steer the car back into the lane.. I tried this several times and while the LDW (Lane Departure Warning) works fine, the “Steering Assist” seems useless… it doesn’t really do enough to get you back into the middle of the lane or in my experience, it doesn’t even prevent you from leaving the lane… I did check the setting and the “active” part of was on, so it SHOULD have worked. Whatever I tried, I couldn't get it to work or be more "active", yes, I felt a nudge on the steering wheel trying to pull me back on track, but it was hit & miss and most of the time, I ended up leaving the lane!

Is my experience unique? I think the LDW+SA felt fairly useless (other than the beep that I’m leaving my lane which you get a lot of when you don’t use indicators changing lanes and over time you get immune to them).

Does the PRIME with its latest technology improve that upon what the 2017 4th Gen Prius has, or are the 2 systems exactly the same? I feel this is one area where Honda seems more futuristic

 

Per my previous post in this thread, the 2017 Prius Prime behaves in the same manner as the 2017 Prius that you drove. Hence my comment regarding never turning it on again.

 

Yes it has basic shapes so that it can discern a pedestrian walking across a street from a car moving away from you. This is different from being able to read traffic signs to catch speed changes and make informed decisions about trucks with trailers. Knowing that certain shapes are likely a type of thing is different from shape detection and a large catalog of details about shape behaviors. Tesla's models allow the AI to understand that a deer shaped pattern in front of it may behave in a certain pattern and to take appropriate protections based on that pattern's behavior. The Toyota system does not get that deep, it detects shapes and current movement and makes a guess that it will continue in that pattern to make a choice to warn, take action or do nothing.

Yes and it doesn't do a very good job of that. It detects the crack filler as lanes and fires off a warning when I drive over crack filler that is along the same path I am traveling. It is a good alert and notification, but it is false too often to make it truly useful for this purpose of guidance of a car. It would need to be able to learn from its mistakes and update its software with changes.

This is another example of what you would like it to do, versus what it is currently capable of. The system is definitely not designed for this. Could Toyota set its engineers to design an autonomous system similar to Tesla's, sure, but it isn't designed this way. I know it isn't because it doesn't have the ability to receive the levels of updates that the Tesla system gets over the network which would be necessary for it to have a machine learning capability to actually run a guidance system. It also would need to have updated map details for the system which it doesn't have. Again, could Toyota piece together a system similar to that using just the sensors it has, possible, the first generation Tesla only had 10 extra sensors over the Toyota package so maybe they could do a poor man's edition of this, but I wouldn't want to use it.

This is again an assumption, you assume it has all the sensors currently engaged to make this type of decision. It may, it may not. But even if it has all the sensors, is it using them, or capable of using them in a way that it could make these types of decisions? The Tesla system is able to make certain decisions on what is in front of it by using its 360 degree view to understand what is going on around it. Having more data to work with, it is able to make more informed decisions on patterns of actions it could take and should take.

It still comes down to expectation versus documented features in the vehicle. If you want these features to improve, you should certainly share your experience and your concerns with the current feature set with Toyota so that they can add it to their data to inform how they move forward with adapting their technology to future feature sets. My guess is that some of the features people want, were actually removed from the current TSS because they weren't testing well enough to consider them safe for inclusion. Previous Toyota systems had LKA rather than LDW, this change is likely because testing in the newly designed system showed inconsistencies in function that made them decide it was unsafe to include. Could the system do it? Sure, but should it? Maybe not. They may also have been removed because it opened up a giant lawsuit avenue for the use of the feature in a way that the feature was not intended. By removing it, they removed risk for themselves. The downside of buying from a mass market company versus a small market company. Tesla is in the business of taking risks, Toyota not so much.

 

I haven't noticed the nudge at all either. It's WAY different than my 2010 Prius with LKA, but then I found that so annoying that I turned it off -- it didn't understand roads that didn't have lines available all the time. For my new Prime, I leave it on, but don't consider it an active system like the LKA, only a warning system. It really wasn't why i bought the Prime in the first place, because I never used it anyway...

 

Agreed!

It is weird how when when the "steer assist" is active, so few of us notice any nudge or any real attempt at the car to correct itself and stay within the lane... I think I have tried it about 10 times and I felt a nudge about 2 or 3 times where it felt that the car would correct and steer back into the lane... but it really was hit & miss. Perhaps the "steer assist" only works under certain circumstances that we didn't work out yet?

 

There is a yellow indicator on the right of the dash when the steering assist is actually operating (its an image of a steering wheel). Also the display on the radar activity monitor shows a "blue wave" to the side of the road when steer assist is operating - it took me a while to work out what that meant on the display.

kevin