See. This is the problem. Where do you draw the line ? I can see somebody who can come and say, adaptive cruise control and lane departure assist which applies slight tourque when the car sees your drift out of lane very helpful to them. next up, adaptive cruise control and lane centering which applies torque most of the time on straight roads but cant do curves. THis is now available most if not all car systems today , in the most basic version without any additional packages.

Then comes some smarter ones like Tesla AP or comma.ai which are pretty good at centering on straight roads, curve roads, wide lanes, lane splitting etc.

Are there cars shipping now with lane centering that can only handle perfectly straight roads? In my experience most manufacturers currently offer at least one model & trim that has lane centering & adaptive cruise that is functionally equivalent to basic AP. In some cases, e.g. SuperCruise, it's significantly better.

Yes there are some. Eg: Acura MDX. It uses the mobileye chipset and can barely make a highway turn. The car is good otherwise, but it in no way compares to the Tesla ADAS (I have daily driven both). The Tesla has done several trips to LA and back with >1hr between touches on California i5. my commute on bay area 280 feels far more natural on Autopilot when cars cut me off etc. I think performance depends significantly on what roads people drive.

I have a Toyota Rav 4 2021 with adaptive cruise control and lane assist, it worked ok on highways, especially not having it before. You have to keep nudging the wheel every 30 seconds or so which made it annoying.

I upgraded to a Comma 3 and it's basically is night and day. The car never hunts from side to side and it uses eye tracking so I don't have to touch the wheel. Again if you have to touch a wheel on a ACC system, just drive the car haha.

So you run Comma AI on a RAV4? I assume the Toyota has to have the requisite packages already optioned from the factory so the hardware is there? I'm just curious, because I'm leaning towards picking up a RAV4 Prime for my wife to use as a daily driver. I'm not 100% sure I care too much about the technology as a practical matter (I had a Tesla, I usually just drove it myself; but I like driving). But it might be fun to dork around with and see what they've built.

Yea Rav4 Hybrid 2021. afaik it doesn't work on the Prime, although you can check the car chart on the comma.ai site to be sure. I like playing with the forks every now and then too.

> Again if you have to touch a wheel on a ACC system, just drive the car haha.

I disagree with this. I use to get RSI type pain from long drives. The constant, small tweaks really took a toll on my hands/wrists/forearms.

When my car's lane centering isn't perfect, it still takes 90% of the force off. It's even more noticeable in windy conditions. Lane centering fights all of the gusts automatically.

Fair enough. I just find the steering wheel nag really really annoying. The future is eye tracking or a combination of eye and wheel nag (maybe every 5 minutes or something)

Where I live and with the kind of driving I do it actually feels safer because I get less tired on longer drives. This is long straight semi rural driving though. I don't use it on tight roads or in traffic. Be interesting to see the statistics on safety of lane assist and adaptive cruise control.

Mine has radar cruise control and "lane assist", which gives you a nudge back if the car drifts, but won't try to follow the lane by itself. Instead, it just beeps at you angrily and stops you killing yourself.

I think that's a good balance, because it's giving you alerts but you're still the one driving.

Yes I have the same thing and it's great. The radar cruise control allows me to stop being focused on maintaining speed and following the car ahead of me and let's me put more attention towards noticing traffic developments ahead, scanning the state of cars around me, and keeping an eye out for various hazards. I wouldn't want lane centering (as opposed to lane keep assist, which I have), because it would be too easy to shutoff and not pay attention to what's going on, and the window between realizing the lane centering is doing something wrong and needing to take over from it is too small for comfort given human reaction times.

Turns out, at least in my own personal experience, that’s not how it works. I don’t think this has been well studied, especially in the context of driving in a vehicle with gaze / attention tracking features.

While my Tesla is working to keep the car perfectly centered in the highway lane, it frees me to focus on higher-level situational awareness during the drive.

In particular, I find I can more quickly and consistently identify and avoid other distracted drivers, because I can look more closely at those features without drifting a few inches out of the middle of the lane.

Just because you are not steering does not mean you have to disengage from driving. The focus on steering as a proxy for engagement is over-simplistic. Manual steering just to lane center can lead to “blind stare” which causes many accidents, so it’s a lossy proxy for attention / focus.

As a new technology is adopted and people become less scared of the change, it eventually comes to a point where a new generation laughs at how things used to be done.

What HN consistently likes to frame as a fundamental human limitation (“driving without actively steering can never be safe”) is in fact just a faulty assumption and purely conjecture in the context of a modern car cockpit with advanced lane keeping, adaptive cruise, object detection, and driver gaze & blink tracking.