My 5 year old Subaru has been able to lane keep and auto follow to the point that a 2h drive on the freeway is me tapping the wheel every ten seconds to keep it enabled while I watch for idiots. It has been able to do this since I bought it, and I haven’t paid a dime extra. Car cost 30k.
I have a 2020 Forester and I've come to describing it as "I no-longer drive on the highway, I manage the car." Sometimes I'll get nervous and take over. But even in stop-and-go traffic, it has behaved perfectly.
My only complaint is that there's an over-eager PID loop with lane keeping. If I want to pass a transport truck and want to kind of edge to the left of my lane when doing so, it will keep trying to compensate, which I can feel in the wheel, so I compensate for as well. And if I let go of the wheel and let it win, it suddenly flings me towards the right side of the lane.
I suspect this is because it isn't programmed to think that I'm making adjustments, it probably just thinks there's some weirdness in the vehicle dynamics/road characteristics that requires extra compensation.
I have a 2023 Crosstrek, my wife has a '21 Ascent. I have the same habit you do - edging away from large trucks slightly - and both of them do the same thing you described to me.
It's essentially that Subaru's lane system actually has two levels: it has lane keeping where it's just trying to keep you inside the lines, and then on top of that it also has lane centering which is pretty much what it says.
Just a note for you or anyone reading who has a recent Subaru and doesn't know already: if you find the centering really bothersome, you should be able to be able to go into the settings on the instrument cluster display (up/down arrows at the lower left behind the wheel, toggle it until you get to the "hold for settings" option), find the Eyesight settings, and turn off lane centering. It will still try to keep you inside the lane markers but won't try to park you right in the center of the lane. In that mode, it's more like the Honda Sensing system I had on my 2016 Civic.
I go back and forth a bit on it but mostly keep it in lane centering mode now - I've gotten used to how it positions the car in the lane, and it lets me focus more on what's going on around me than micromanaging lane position and such.
> It's essentially that Subaru's lane system actually has two levels: it has lane keeping where it's just trying to keep you inside the lines, and then on top of that it also has lane centering which is pretty much what it says.
Same with Hyundai except they call them "Lane Keeping Assist" (LKA) and "Lane Following Assist" (LFA) and I have trouble remembering which one centers you and which one just keeps you from leaving the lane.
To me just based on the names I'd have expected keeping to be the one that actively positions you (it keeps you centered) and following to the one that just reacts when you are going to depart the lane (it keeps you following the lane).
Mostly now I just remember that the one that comes on automatically any time I'm going 40+ mph is the reactive one, and the one that I have to explicitly turn on is the centering one (although both come on automatically on certain highways based on data from the navigation system).
idk whether subaru is exact the same as hyundai but i basically turned lane centering off on my hyundai. when possible i only use radar cruise control, and lane follow. if i want to overtake, turn on my signal and it'll automatically safely increase speed to set cc speed and let the lane follow off. it's pretty seamless.
lane centering is a bit too annoying for me, i need to keep my hands on the wheels anyway.
> I have a 2020 Forester and I've come to describing it as "I no-longer drive on the highway, I manage the car." Sometimes I'll get nervous and take over. But even in stop-and-go traffic, it has behaved perfectly.
I drive an old beater from 2001, but... I really don't think I understand why people want these in-between not-quite-autopilot features? To me it's like, it would be one thing if you could completely turn your brain off, or look at your phone, or rest. But since you can't, it seems like this stuff makes it more difficult to pay the appropriate amount of attention? For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
As a technologist, I like lane-keep assist because it feels fundamentally more right that my car by default follows the road than keeps going with the turn radius I had previously input.
Cruise control with minimum distance helps me keep a sound distance even as other cars keep packing up and reducing distances on a busy highway. My previous car (Mercedes) was great at detecting if a new car coming in front of me was accelerating, if so it didn't adjust the distance as aggressively. Much better behavior than my current Kia.
Auto-break features are sweet as they react really fast. If that can avoid deploying an airbag in my face, I'm all for it.
I agree it's a lot like managing, with six buttons just to do the above, but from a bottom-up approach, each feature has value in its own right.
> For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
Where do you draw the line? Would you prefer not having a steering and brake servo? Would you prefer sticking out your arms instead of having flashing lights? Would you prefer feeling every bump in the road to having suspension?
To me these systems just feel like natural evolution of the car concept, something that's been going on for 120 years. What Tesla failed at was putting their heads in the clouds and hoping something awesome would eventually pop out the other end. While the established car makers did incremental improvements.
GP said s/he didn't understand why anyone would want these in-betweens. I gave an explanation as to why.
Based on what you're saying, it seems the divide arises from some drivers classifying these features as physical comfort, and some as mentally disengaging.
The cognitive load is greatly reduced when using these features. Honestly, adaptive cruise control in the city is a godsend. Not having to deal with watching speed . start and stop traffic is also automated for me. Driving on a highway is also great .. You can drive much further without needing a break.
Same. Even cruise control is kind of useless because people in front of you don't necessarily use it and are very inconsistent in their speed.
So you end up constantly having to engage/disengage, rendering the whole thing moot.
I think something like autopilot could be implemented at the infrastructure level (sensors and emitters along the road), but people wouldn't like that because it would mean being unable to set your speed or overtake.
The car exists for "freedom," but it is really an inefficient mode of transportation from both a time-use and energy-use perspective.
What we really need is a mix between rail/train and car/road.
ACC generally has a 3-4 second time interval that it permits between you and the car in front of you. I live in SoCal, so a lot of my driving is on very aggressive routes. The 4-second gap is mechanically safe but it's practically unusable because it creates a void large enough to invite other cars to lane change in front of me. So when that car merges in, the ACC detects a violation of the safe braking distance and decelerates to reestablish the gap. I call it the "cut me off" loop when we're on trips.
And before anyone suggests that I start tinkering around with the settings, I have adjusted it and the damned thing just resets itself constantly.
The beauty of ACC is it lets your disengage mentally. You can be aggro if you want to with it on, but I found it's just not emotionally worth it to get mad at being cut off anymore in a car with ACC. ACC just handles going forwards and I'm not having to touch gas nor brake. If I'm not touching either, I don't have to panic react to getting cut-off, just make sure the ACC is handling it, and if that's all I need to check, vs slam on the brakes, then eh.
Ah yes, I never used that. My car isn't very recent (about 10 years old now), and I drive very little (about 2-3k per year; I take the train to go anywhere far) because I hate it.
But the adaptive part would make it much more useful indeed.
However, something that is extremely annoying in France is that speed limits tend to change very often and abruptly.
I just think that trying to solve the problem solely at the car level is always going to have too many limitations...
I prefer to steer, but radar cruise control takes a lot of the frustration out of minor speed fluctuations in front of me on the highway. I don’t feel as much need to pass all the time.
Have a EX90 I got on a really great deal, we drove it cross-country and it was mind-blowing how little I had to do. If it didn't make you touch the wheel / pay attention we could have basically done the entire trip without incident minus off-ramps.
But there was one thing that was quite bad, similar to yours. While passing a semi I pulled it to the left side and it actually yanked us right so hard and then over-corrected once again. Super scary moment, the only issue of the whole trip, but basically never passed with it on again.
How you like that car? I test drove an early model that was really a pre-release dealer demo. It was a great ride but I also didnt get to do a whole lot with the sales guy next to me and a tight deadline to get back home.
Made me want to invest in Volvo. They fixed most of the software issues, what's left is a shockingly nice experience. Touch screen can be a bit annoying is all, but Google integration and design of the UX in the touchscreen is really good.
My volvo also has a "not perfectly tuned" PID loop. With "autopilot" engaged it keeps weaving constantly left and right inside the lane im in. Have gotten used to keeping a firm-ish pressure on the steering wheel at all times to compensate. But drivers behind me must have thought me drunk before i got the hang of it.
This is lane keep assist not lane centering and dangerous to use as a lane centering feature as it’s not designed to do that hence the ping ponging behavior
Lane keep assist is always enabled, this "copilot" or whatever it's called is an extra feature i can manually enable over the default lane assist. And it will steer and follow the road quite well in most conditions. But sometimes it starts the ping pong behaviour.
Should also be noted that i never take my hands of the wheel. And the volvo is quite fast at beeping at me if it detects that i dont hang onto the wheel.
Don’t most of these systems release the lane-keeping when you turn on the turn signal? Does yours not, or do you not signal until you are trying to exit the lane? (Genuinely asking.)
Same with mine from last year. I don't tap the wheel, but I treat it as 'co-driving' or like the car has its own somewhat fussy opinions on where to be. If I zoom up on another car at a stop it's capable of freaking out and braking, it follows other cars at a good safe distance, and the lane keeping feels like you're holding the car's hand as it goes along, and its attention is generally better than yours. Works for me.
I don't want 'nap in the backseat while it drives me places', I want this. A bit of a personality keeping me on track and tidy. I'll keep my hands on the wheel but yeah, my attention is spared to watch for idiots, and I think that's good.
I appreciate that to the extent that I went into a heavy car payment to be able to have these lane-keeping things. I fully expect the assistance will be able to help me undertake longer drives for exactly that reason.
I find managing the system to be more tiring and stressful than just driving to be honest. I do not like when my vehicle behaves in a way I didn’t anticipate.
Maybe I just need more time with it but, my toyota had adaptive cruise and slammed on the brakes one time and I did not like it. On a one lane highway the car a decent ways in front of me slowed down and started moving into the shoulder to take a right turn into a driveway. As i came up on him he was almost all the way over, just his driver side wheels on the line. I moved to the far side of the lane with plenty of room to clear without slowing down and my toyota slammed on the brakes going from 65 to like 40 and it scared the shit out of me. It was a greater level of surprise and fear than I’d experienced in probably the last 20k miles of driving and was completely avoidable had I been using dumb cruise control.
Driving my mom’s Honda insight with lane assist also made me nervous when I would be near the edge of a lane on purpose and it would move the wheel on its own.
I’m not opposed to fully automated driving, but what I don’t want is to be in a situation where I need to remain alert and responsible for managing a system that does the driving. I’d rather just do the driving myself. I’ve driven for almost 20 years now, some of that professionally, and it’s second nature at this point and doesn’t require active thought outside navigating new routes and finding parking. Managing the system requires more effort for me.
I now drive a standard 33 year old truck and it’s bliss. No software updates, no bs, just a machine that takes my inputs and gets me from A to B. That said, without airbags, crumple zones and abs I’d have to get something more modern if there were children in the picture.
> My 5 year old Subaru has been able to lane keep and auto follow to the point that a 2h drive on the freeway is me tapping the wheel every ten seconds
I have a '22 Outback. My Dad has a Tesla of similar vintage. I have to pay about as much attention for FSD as I do with the Subaru, the difference being the Subaru is more predictable.
Can't wait for Waymo to start chopping into the top end of the market.
I have a newer Subaru as my daily driver. The EyeSight system is fine for what it is but it's very limited. The lane keep assist doesn't work on curvy roads. If brakes unnecessarily when the car ahead takes a highway exit. It cuts out completely in heavy precipitation where a human driver can still proceed safely at low speed.
Well... yeah, but the Tesla will do that on an empty road, then approach a slow car from behind and make a lane change decision to pass, then take your next exit and continue on through city streets, through all sorts of traffic conditions, to your destination. And it will monitor your attention with eye tracking instead of making you mess with the wheel.
It's absolutely true that the rest of the industry is rolling out new features. But people are fooling themselves if they genuinely think it's catching up. Tesla is way, way ahead here among consumer auto vendors, and frankly at parity with Waymo in the autonomy space.
They've also made an inexplicably poor pricing decision in this case that is worth talking about. But no, your Subaru isn't a meaningful competitor.
Clearly I needed to be more precise: Tesla's vehicle autonomy features have no meaningful competition in the consumer auto space, period. Anyone who tries to claim otherwise is flogging some kind of angle, generally a political one. And I say this as someone who despises Musk's politics. But the cars his company makes are way, way, way ahead on this particular feature.
Is that a joke? Tesla's consumer vehicle autonomy features are ahead in some ways but way behind GM and Mercedes-Benz in others. In particular the Mercedes Drive Pilot system is true SAE level 3 where the manufacturer assumes legal liability for vehicle operation. Tesla has nothing like that available to consumers.
Drive Pilot cannot perform a single one of the maneuvers I listed above.
It's just a stunt. They took a machete to the feature set to find Just One Thing that would meet the requirements. All it does is use radar to follow another car on a selection of fixed, geofenced limited access highways. It can't handle the leader changing lanes, or going too fast (won't even get to the speed limit). It won't navigate, it won't change lanes. It can't even operate on an open road.
But it's "L3V31 THr333", so otherwise rational nerds get to yell about it on the internet. No one actually shows this thing off in their cars, it's not useful for real driving. FSD drives me around literally every day.
> Well... yeah, but the Tesla will do that on an empty road, then approach a slow car from behind and make a lane change decision to pass, then take your next exit and continue on through city streets, through all sorts of traffic conditions, to your destination. And it will monitor your attention with eye tracking instead of making you mess with the wheel.
The point is that it now only does that if you subscribe. If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area
> If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area
It's... a car. You already pay a monthly fee. Probably several.
I get the marketing angle here, that this is a bad look and will drive away customers.
I was responding to the attempt upthread (which you just repeated) to conflate it with a technical argument ("better feature set"). The feature set is not worse because it costs money. FSD is in fact market leading.
It makes the idea of a putative consumer who refuses to pay ongoing costs for their car a little silly though. Argue about whether the product value is worth the cost, not from a position of "people won't pay any more for their already extremely expensive vehicles".
> The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.
The fee under discussion is literally the cost of purchasing an FSD subscription.
I'm not repaying for the same fuel, I am paying for new fuel. I'm not rebuying for the same insurance, I pay for the potential accidents in a time frame. With registration I am paying for the wear I am inflicting on the public roads for a time frame. I expect to own the car and it is staying the same. Paying for it again is called renting.
> and frankly at parity with Waymo in the autonomy space.
Waymos have been driving around autonomously for years; meanwhile Tesla taxis have a human in the car ready to activate a kill switch at all times. Therefore, your statement is objectively false.
It's a stunt. If they believed it worked, they wouldn't need somebody dedicated to monitoring it for the entire time it's on the road. Having nobody in the car looks cool, but there is nothing different about the car's self driving capability, and the economics are even worse than having the safety driver in the car.
It's no different on a technical level than Waymo using remote operators. Presumably Tesla just hasn't wired that up, or doesn't plan to.
FWIW, your logic works better the other way around anyway: if the system didn't work, there would be easily-accessible proof to that effect showing the resulting hilarity as the operator needed to step in. There isn't.
And... of course there isn't. Because FSD is real and works and it drives a ton of us around every day. Is it possible that there are failure modes? Of course. Thus the safety personnel. But the bar of "if they believed it worked" was crossed years ago. Yes, it works. Duh. Go to a dealer and get a test drive if you don't believe people on the internet.
Waymo doesn't have one or more operators dedicated to each vehicle for the entire time it is on the road. That is massively different. The latest disengagement data for FSD 14 shows that Tesla is still behind where Waymo was more than a decade ago.
No it's entirely different on a technical level, because waymos always drive themselves. The human operators don't drive, and in fact can't, they can only make decisions that the car then executes.
Waymos are autonomous vehicles, Tesla has some vehicles which may operate autonomously in certain circumstances. There's a big difference.
Waymo's operators can absolutely control the vehicles directly. I'm not sure what you're trying to cite here. The only effective difference in architecture here is where, physically, the backup operator sits.
I know it's upsetting to think that someone you hate has a good product, but... they do. Arguing on the internet isn't rolling back the launch.
They can't, they don't have a steering wheel or remote controller or anything. And this is supported by the fact that waymos are actually level 4 autonomous, and Tesla's are not.
This has nothing to do with Elon musk. From a purely technical standpoint, no - Tesla DOES NOT have autonomous vehicles to the level of their competitors. It's not a matter of opinion.
Fair enough, but is still a Subaru. So it doesn’t make sense to compare its value to a Tesla just because of auto steer. If it comes to that, there’s a lot of value in a Tesla for which you don’t pay a dime either, like constant and actually useful system upgrades, a reliable charging network and great customer service. It’s also a good looking car with a great user interface that gets better and better with free updates. Now if you are a person dropping 50K on a Tesla, you can likely afford FSD if that’s something important to you. FSD is not comparable to any auto steer I have tried on any car, and I drive a bunch of different rental cars because I travel a lot by road for business. I like the new flexibility of being able to pay for FSD when you are going to use it only, like during a long trip. There’s no point to be on FSD (or autopilot) to run errands in the city.
