Featured IIHS wants more nags

Is there a way to be sure from the outside that PID control really isn't used, as opposed to, say, the P, I, and D coefficients not being chosen well for that situation?

 

IMHO: it isn't poor regulation, It's poor management. Up in northern California, mostly covered by PG&E; the deferred maintenance of their power infrastructure and gas pipelines caused major catastrophes. Just so management could pat them selves on the back and give themselves outsized bonuses every year for all the great cost cutting they've done. The wild fire that burned down the town of Paradise was sparked by a 100+ year old shackle that broke and sent a power line into dry weeds below. PG&E management has just changed, only time will tell if it's more the same or real change is coming.
It's all the lawsuits against PG&E that's driving up prices. Every-time there's another class-action judgement against that company, it's their customers that pay the price in increased rates. This is like the proposed foreign goods tariff or Mexico is going to pay for that wall BS - that's suppose to magically fix everything. It's more complicated than that.....
I'm lucky enough to be under SMUD (Sacramento municipal utility district), where I only pay $0.15/KwH on a tiered system - $0.35/KwH if your using electricity during peak hours.
I believe @bisco stated that his was in the $0.40+/KwH range, which seems strange, since Canadian hydro is dirt cheap. Once you start getting into that high cost electrical rate; why bother going electric when the ICE pencils out to be about the same?

Just my 2-cents....

 

I've experienced "pilot-involved oscillation" two different times, once on a bicycle as a kid and once years later in a small SUV, triggered by crossing a patch of ice. Both events ended with me choosing the clearest side of the road to ditch in.

Because of the mass differences, the time constants were very different: the bike one was very quick, whishwhishWhishWHISHWTFWHISH thump, and in the SUV it was more like whish, ok I can correct that, whish, overshot a little but I got this, Whish, huh this is harder than I thought, WHISH I don't got this WHISH thump.

Those were both with me in control, and for most driving I've been tuned pretty well, but there can be certain conditions where my tuning won't work out.

From a past job—not a directly relevant story because a hardware change was involved, but it was interesting—I had to troubleshoot a system that was doing PID control of a condenser water loop's temperature by controlling a water valve. Somebody had substituted a different water valve, one where our signal to the actuator became the rate of valve motion instead of the absolute valve position. Under the original tuning that didn't work well at all.

Managed to get it controlling nicely again, essentially by first rotating the three original coefficients, then fine-tuning from there.

 

i didn't go electric to save money, that's for sure.

it appears that they have been attempting to bring a line down, but covid.
construction costs rose 50% and our governor just signed a bill allowing the power companies to increase rates to pay for it.
on top of all that, canada is in a drought, and is now buying power from the us.

canadian-hydropower-growing-cost-renegotiated-contracts-4045958a12082ab6aff29fe2e339922d

 

Keeping the vehicle in the lane and at the appropriate speed and following distance has been available in certain Toyotas since '19 at least. I use it all the time when driving longer distances on a 2 lane divided highway. On rural 1 lane wash way roads and city streets, I am the pilot. And as for passing and parking, those nags I like. But doing it for me might lull me to sleep.

I do leave on the car drifting over the marked edge of the road nag. Seems useful on rural roads.

Maybe I have gotten used to knowing where I am going, using a GPS built in, stopping for gas when it is convenient to me, and such.

When I am no longer able to drive, autonomous driving might be helpful. By then I hope to be in a self contained assisted living community that provides routine rides to needed destinations. (I'm 81.5) Until then a 5 year old system that doesn't promise more than it can deliver does me just fine.

 

I think the TSS in my RAV4P is also the 2.5. Radar cruise works fine in mine, but a few tests of lane keeping were very annoying, so I just leave it turned off.

 

Redundancy is good. Ideally you want both. They could both fail in certain conditions, as different wavelengths work differently in different conditions; so, having both will make the system failsafe.

 

I still await my first forward phantom braking event. Have received the impression that this method's detection flaws have also been improved.

Rearward phantom braking happens every time I install the hitch-mount bike rack and forget to turn off the backup collision avoidance before backing up.

I believe "more failsafe", or "more fault tolerant", would be more accurate than simply "failsafe".

 

I'd like more detail about how FSD overcomes some optical artifacts. And what caused it to run down and kill a local in-lane motorcyclist in good weather.

 

Tesla is bringing radar back, at least in the S and X.
Tesla teardown confirms the presence of the new radar in HW4-equipped vehicles - Tesla Oracle

 

nags are distracting. I try to tell the wifey that, but she don't listen either. I'm eyeing a possible difficult situation, she screams and I look elsewhere thinking I missed something. Now I'm not watching the oncoming car swerving into my lane because I'm looking for a deer or anything else I missed.

And no, by nags I'm NOT referring to the wife!

 

Giving Tesla gets sued quite often these days, one case is regarding "phantom braking". The case is still ongoing but to prove their point an extensive expert report was created from an independent expert witness driving around 700km and documenting 5 phantom breaks for the court.

After the last one the test had to be cancelled on public road

The full 19 page report is in German but can be easily translated
https://teslaanwalt.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Gutachten-Phantombremsung-Web.pdf

 

A recent report covering 1,000 miles of mixed use came up with one intervention per 13 miles.

 

I think that was not about phantom breaking, but just any driver intervention while using FSD,
Many reason for these that have nothing to do with safety, such as:
- Nav picked poor route or driver decided to go off route
- parking at end of route
- car hesitates, being extra safe, such as on a right turn on red and driver wants to be polite to those following so tap on the pedal to go

Mike

 

And Tesla had catastrophic accidents because its cameras couldn't detect giant objects in plain daylight as you know.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/tesla-autopilot-crash-analysis/

 

The usual apologists will point out that this crash was over 5 years ago, and is no longer relevant because the systems have greatly advanced since then. It is more difficult for them to dismiss the local-to-me case this spring where a driver on FSD ran over and killed the in-lane motorcyclist in front of him. He is now facing a Vehicular Homicide DSO (Disregard for Safety of Others) charge:

Elon Musk’s big lie about Tesla is finally exposed | Page 7 | PriusChat

Though the most hard core fan-bois dismiss every incident that happened on any firmware older than the most recent over-the-air firmware update. Considering the frequency of these updates, this makes a convenient catch-all excuse.