Limitations of "radar cruise" augmented driving

Ridiculous "argument" and you know it.

If you live in a big city where they actually have a good light rail transit system, you can do most or all of that.

 

I don't know of any city anywhere on the planet that has even 50% of that, and that's not even talking about how the train is going to help me carry a car load of groceries home, a couple of bookshelves from the furniture store, or ten bags of potting soil from the nursery. For anything other than routine commuting between fixed points, public transit is completely useless. Even then, it's rarely as useful, convenient, or fast as driving yourself.

I live and work within three miles of commuter train/subway stops and traveling by public transit still takes almost double the amount of time as driving myself, and that's in rush hour traffic.

 

Spoken like a true "left coaster".......who has no concept of the world outside of his own narrow view.
And who, apparently, also has no respect for any views that don't conform with yours.
Pretty sad.

 

Going back to the original question:

Nope, but only because I have the 2017 version.

Are you missing something? Yes, it sounds like you are. Generally speaking, you don't want to 'explore the limits' of safety systems. Instead you should try to understand how they are supposed to work and use them within those confines.

The radar cruise is designed for freeway use on relatively straight roads. Since it tries to track the cars ahead of you, it does not handle the following situation:

You are following a car in the left lane on a tight left curve with a radius so small that the car 100 feet ahead of you goes out of sight behind the k-rail barrier that separates ongoing traffic. It can't "see" the car so it wants to disconnect the DRCC. Bummer.

To that situation add the complication of a slower moving truck in the right lane at the point where the car you are following rounds the curve. The DRCC is likely to see this as the new vehicle that you are following and it will lock onto that speed. The situation is quite similar to making a lane change and following the new vehicle. The result is that your car, in the left lane, will brake to avoid collision with the truck in the right lane. It makes sense because you are, after all, pointing right at the truck, right?

It is possible to make the whole system smart enough to handle driving in tight mountain roads. It would need to combine the radar with cameras to locate the lanes as well as identify the vehicle that you are following. It would also need feedback from the steering to ensure that your path will not cause you to change lanes. As a system designer would say, to make it do all that is beyond the scope of the project.

But.... The DRCC was designed for relatively straight freeways, and excels at slow and go commute traffic.

 

It's an objective fact that can be measured. Public transit is slower and more inconvenient that private transport in all cases excepting cities where politicians have intentionally sabotaged means of private transport.

It wouldn't be 2021 without somebody claiming having a differing opinion is disrespectful. I wonder if saying that is a microagression or some other nonsense made-up word?

This is getting pretty far from self-driving cars, especially as it relates to the Prius.

 

No it isn't. Not if you live within a few blocks of a transit station or bus stop AND work a few blocks from one at the other end.
And that describes the situation for tens of millions of people around the world that use light rail daily.

And speed and convenience are not the only considerations.
In many cases, not even the most important.
Do you enjoy breathing the brown air around LA and much of the rest of southern California ??

 

Strangely, after buying my Prius I ended up working in San Francisco and living at the end of the BART light rail in a suburb. I lived less than a mile from the BART station, and worked only 6 blocks from one of the SF BART stations. My car was only used for that 1 mile trip to and from the local BART station. It took over an hour door to door to make that 30 mile commute. Hidden in that hour was 15 to 30 minutes on an open air platform followed by walking 10 minutes or more uphill through SF fog, wind and rain.

As for the brown air in the LA basin... it's much better than it used to be. I can actually see the outlines of the mountains in the distance as I drive up 73 .

 

Call ME when autonomous driving means JUST that....and not one more thing that will become useless if hacked.
Otherwise?
It’s only as reliable as the internet....or GPS...or any of the other subsystems that it depends on.

 

I thought it had gotten a lot better than it really HAS.

A few years ago, maybe 5, I was driving into San Diego from the east and was APPALLED by the brown/gray haze that covered that whole area.

I thought I remembered that about 40 years ago that southern area was pretty clear.
Maybe not.

 

No! When I was a kid I remembered being locked inside at school because of "3rd stage smog alerts." The air was so bad I remember complaining to my parents that my eyes burned. When returning to Los Angeles on a plane flight it looked exactly like the fog rolling in and enveloping the Golden Gate in San Francisco, but it was brown. Things are 100x better than they used to be despite the fact that we have triple the number of cars.

 

You say strawman, I say your calling it such is an oversimplification. I have lived 30 minutes from the nearest emergency room, making it 1 hour to wait for the ambulance and return. Regardless of what the "system" prefers, parents will drive their bleeding children to the hospital.

 

At least where I live, there are multiple first responder bases stationed much closer than any hospital emergency room, so they can arrive at the scene quicker than a parent can get to the hospital. Even without any of the common severe traffic congestion impeding the parent's race.

And they all start treating promptly patients at the scene. They don't merely haul untreated victims to a hospital. This model initiates life-saving treatment quicker than the parent-racing-to-the-ER model.

I also must wonder what fraction of road traffic is really made up of those parents rushing their kids to the hospital. It seems that it should be minuscule enough to not be a significant factor in ordinary self-driving-vehicle algorithm design.

 

In most places, it doesn't work like that.

The transport vehicle usually comes from the Fire Station nearest to your house, which hopefully is a LOT less than a half hour away.

BUT it is a really good idea for people to find out how it works in your specific situation so you don't have to guess.

 

I never said it works that way everywhere, or even most places. I agree with you, but to circle back to how this is relevant to the original discussion, advocates of autonomous driving tend to ignore the messy edge cases. I was simply pointing one out.