DRCC emergency stop at 70mph

Curious as to what's the percentage of gen 4 Prius came with advanced technology package either as standard or as option. I think it's only about 5 or 6% of all gen 3 Prius had the advanced technology package.

 

I've owned my 2017 Prius Two for about a month now and I have one major gripe regarding DRCC... The changing display when operating is very distracting and could actually result in driver distraction (IMHO). As a programmer in the field of HMI, the popup displays need to be optimized to only popup when something is actually going to affect the obvious operation of the car. Of course a verbose mode should be available to test functionality.. An example of useless popups is the appearance and disappearance of a lead vehicle when the speed does not adjust... Wish I new who to complain too!

 

I totally at. If they are still monitoring @Prius Team is the Toyota US marketing team responsible. You may wish to try and PM then if they do not respond here.

 

I disagree - most of the time, I don't look too much at that screen - the HUD gives all that's needed for normal driving.

But, if I've merged, or the vehicles in front of me have done some shuffling, I will sometimes glance to check if 1) it's lost view of the car in front; or 2) it has actually tracked onto the vehicle in front - particularly if it's a trailer, truck or motorbike which can be a bit hit and miss. If I had to shuffle buttons to bring up that display every time, that could be dangerous.

 

If you use the HIS screen, the popups can be very distracting & confusing. The only way around that is to only use the almost useless cruise control screen.

 

I do not have a HUD.

 

As much as I favor "human-in-the-loop" control systems rather than fully automated systems, I will defend the fully-automated systems in this case by pointing out that they can have an almost-instantaneous response time whereas the average human requires about 1/2 second to mentally process the danger signal and another 1/2 second to execute the motor response of applying the brake. Thus the auto-brake system gains about a full second in response time versus the fully alert human. But the second advantage is that the automated system never has lapses in attending to the developing situation whereas the human is quite often momentarily inattentive. How often have you caught yourself looking up to suddenly see a car stopping unexpectedly in front of you?
Conversely, if the human is trained to look and diagnose traffic situations at the farthest possibly forward visual focus point, s(he) can use the wetware to plan and start to execute an accident avoidance maneuver far in advance of what current automated systems can do as they are typically limited to 1 or 2 car immediate look-ahead .

 

Agreed - while test-driving (salesman still behind the wheel), we were in a VW with AEB (etc), he was in traffic merging into steady traffic off a slip lane, glanced at the traffic coming to check he would merge neatly, and the car in front, for not obvious reason stopped, and the AEB very indelicately hit the brakes HARD. Without AEB, he'd have hit the car.

 

I accept the main thrust of your argument, but reliance on the Prius system fails to take into consideration it's potential to cease functioning for reason(s) unknown at any time and without advance warning. This may be rare, but not unknown whether for electro-mechanical reason or simple operator error.

 

Absolutely agree! As a private pilot, I would not use any automated system for flights under about 2 hours as I feel such use decreases situational awareness. (For long commercial flights, mental fatigue is clearly important and justifies judicious use of automation.) Similarly in Prius, the supplemental safety of adding safety systems like auto-braking helps when the driver is momentary distracted or cannot react quickly enough, but I feel that such systems should never be used as an excuse to have the driver out-of-the-loop. Other folks differ on that, obviously!

 

Unfortunately, the person I know who worked on code for the Lexus LFa hasn't been with Toyota for over 10 years...

 

Don't forget that these systems are simply not yet sufficiently comprehensive to handle all the situations that we drivers encounter.

While these systems are better than humans in many situations, the human-in-the-loop is still essential to cover the many holes and corner cases that the machines are not yet adequately programmed to deal with.

 

In other words, AI is still too stupid in many cases.

 

"Stupid" makes it sound like it is the fault of the AI, which is unfair to the dumb computer running the code--maybe "insuffiently programmed AI" would point the finger more directly at the humans ultimately responsible for the situation ?
Speaking of which, I firmly believe in a "glass box" rather than a "black box" approx to AI, and I would REALLY like to see the basic rule set in the Prius's ECU, because just as in some airplane automation, the Prius AI will occasionally surprise me. As a pilot or as a driver, I strongly dislike not understanding what my copilot is doing and the AI copilot cannot be verbally queried, at least in the systems I know.

 

Forgot the </s> tag.