Do you use lane departure warning/assist feature?

Yes...I use it when I'm tired as a backup to warn me if I were to start to doze.

It's not a self driving feature. For me, it works as it's supposed to.

Adaptive cruise is so wonderful I use it most of the time I'm driving. I once used it for a 120 mile drive on the highway in variable traffic without once disengaging it.

 

LDA reminds me to signal lane changes.

Bob Wilson

 

I use it in the stronger setting when driving hundreds or thousands or millions of miles on a road trip in case fatigue sets in, which it will.

 

I used LDA on my 1200 mile road trip. It does give a "nudge" when getting near the lines on the Interstate as well as giving a visual/audio alert. I think of it as more of an "alert" when I am on the Interstate where my attention might wander. Same with the "sway" warning..it came on a couple of times reminding me to pay attention.

Driving for over 45 years I have seen/heard about so many "over-correction" caused fatal accidents. (I have family in Law Enforcement.) What happens is people drift off the road, for whatever reason. Then they panic and SWERVE the other direction. This causes them to lose control. Often when you hear about single car accidents, this is the cause.

I have tried to mentally train myself, that if this happens to me- NOT TO OVER CORRECT but to GRADUALLY turn the wheel back towards the road. This LDA assistant is just an extra layer of protection and I intend to use it when appropriate, mostly on roads with narrow/no shoulder and the Interstate. Having mentally prepared myself for this type of incident may have actually saved my life! In 2014 I was driving to my father's funeral service in OR. I let my (now ex) son in law drive because I had flown all night to the west coast and it was a 6 hour drive...I figured he would be a safer driver as he wasn't fatigued. I, fortunately, could not sleep in the car and noticed at one point the car, traveling at least 80MPH, seemed to be drifting off the road. I was in the passenger seat and looked over and notice my S-I-L was asleep!! I GENTLY touched his arm and said his name not wanting him to PANIC and jerk the wheel. Fortunately he didn't jerk the wheel too much...had I been asleep or not paying attention, my entire family might have been wiped out.

Seriously LDA assistant in that incident might have prevent my need to intervene in this circumstance. I cringe when I think of what "might have happened" had I not been in the front passenger seat, or had been asleep. Some might call it "divine intervention"...I don't know but now I plan to use the LDA feature and never, ever drive with my (ex) son in law again.

 

Lol me too.

 

I found it to be mildly annoying on my daily commute, so I turned it off. It does nudge the wheel ever so slightly. I am a little OCD about using turn signals, but there are some places where I don't bother if there's no other cars around. For longer excursions I turn it on, especially for long highway stretches.

 

I turn it on if I am tired, e.g. after a work shift.
Driving tired is like driving intoxicated: I might think I am driving OK, but the car knows otherwise and lets me know it. It is NOT a substitute driver; it is my wife in the passenger seat telling me my driving is poor.

Then it is up to me to either focus and drive better, or pull off to the side of the road for a nap.

 

Somehow, the title sounds something like "do you ever use the airbags?". From what I've read here: the lane-departure function on 4th gen Prius has moved a lot further towards being an emergency response only, comparing to the lane-keep function on 3rd gen?

 

I’m ALL IN with the various safety features, most of which the Prius Prime has as standard equipment. The benefits greatly outweigh the minor annoyances IMO, so I never turn them off. The emergency braking saved me once, big time. Again IMO, I use all of them, all the time.

 

I am with Bob Wilson. I now even signal lane changes even if there is no one behind me so the duck in the LDA doesn't quack annoyingly at me.

 

No I have LDA turned off 99% of times Most of roads I drive daily have only one lane and lane marks are either faded away or covered with snow. 1% of time I use is when I am on highway for a long trip.

 

I do the same as Salamander_King in keeping the LDA off a majority of the time. Most of the roads I drive on are only one lane in each direction and the paint tends to be faded or purposefully have blank spaces where other roads intersect. The LDA works pretty well for me but there are a few areas where other roads intersect my road in the middle of curves so the LDA mistakenly thinks I'm not staying in my lane simply because I'm turning and the paint disappears to indicate a road intersection. I actually did leave it on for a few months just because I figured, I paid for this feature I should use it... but the beeping kept making me think something was wrong when there wasn't so I had to turn it off before it actually caused me to wreck. If I ever go on a long distance trip then I'll turn it back on.

 

I keep it turned on and have the sensitivity set to high. It beeps at me every once in a while and kind of takes me by surprise. But that's a good thing. It's training me to be a better driver I think. I have not felt the nudge to correct, only heard the beep. It must be very slight because I have not felt it yet.

 

I use it in standard mode all the time. Feel it is a safety thing. Occasional undeserved beep. Have purposely allowed car to drift into line when no other cars are around, and can feel the gentle turn of the steering wheel.

 

I find little use for LDA and really don't think it should be part of the standard safety features. Staying in ones lane is basic driving technique 101, I don't need a computer to tell me how to stay in the lines. This being said I had to laugh at Bob Wilson's post because I used it on a long highway drive this weekend and my wife pointed out how it beeped occasionally when I changed lanes and yet when she was driving it never beeped once...guess I don't use signals as well as I thought!

Personally I think Toyota got their importance on safety features mixed up. I consider LDA non essential as a safety feature, it's something I would expect to see on an upper tier trim of a vehicle. Instead they give that distinction to blind spot monitoring which should absolutely be on all trims as that is something everyone can use.

 

You will thank LDA if you ever had your eyes closed for just a second or two while driving

 

I've never come close to falling asleep at the wheel, but as I get older it's reassuring that LDA is providing some level of additional safety if I mis-estimate my condition.

As a side note, I think I've noticed three distinct operations for LDA: 1) Beep and light up the lane marker orange, 2) steer back into the lane, and 3) resist your steering across the line.

At first I assumed you'd always experience 1 and 2 together and that's how it worked. But I've also experiences 1 without any steering correction (2). Very recently, I think I've seen what appears to be a subtle wind-looking image outside of the lane in the display that indicates steering is taking place. I first saw it when lane marker was orange. At least I think I saw it.

Last night I also noticed something that's happened before and I hadn't paid much attention: I was near the line, and hit a mild up as the road met a bridge and my hand on the wheel moved a bit left and I felt something an awful lot like resistance. I'd felt it before and thought perhaps it was a sort of dead-spot in the power steering or perhaps a rut in the road tracking the tire, but now I'm thinking it was the car resisting me without any indication in the displays.

So right now I'm thinking there are those three operations that can happen in various combinations. (It could be that 2 and 3 are the same thing, just different degrees, but they feel different to me.)

Thoughts?

(Even if I'm just imagining this, I think this ties in to another thread talking about Toyota's autonomous driving effort -- or perceived lack thereof. Toyota seems to be taking a safety-first approach that's adding features to augment the driver -- but making sure they operate very conservatively and not so proactively as to lull the driver into a false sense of security. Even if I'm imagining the operations, above, Toyota could reasonably do this with existing hardware and evolutionary changes to its software rather revolutionary changes to autonomous.)

 

I've been thinking about deactivating LDA just because of (i) inconsistency in alerting me whenever I go over and (ii) the nuisance to hide the notice whenever the speed drops below 32 mph that LDA is unavailable.

 

I don't use it. It doesn't work reliably, often failing to detect the lane lines, especially at night. I've had it into the dealer and they say it's functioning normally. Big fail, as far as I'm concerned.