Cars of the magenta line

[ocelot]

So recently I've had the opportunity, if one can call it that, to drive (for several days) a late-model car with the latest in autopilots and cockpit automation. It is fairly rubbish. I'm not saying whose version, because I expect they're all much the same and I don't see any point in calling out manufacturers individually.

Also, there's no sign that these things will actually be able to drive themselves usefully anytime soon.

For background, the main panel has two sections: on the right, the PFD (aka speedometer); and on the left, a MFD that defaults to a tachometer but has assorted other settings. There's a thumbwheel on the yoke that controls the MFD; but for some reason instead of just cycling among the various displays there's a top-level menu display that you have to visit to change the display... which means it needs eyeballs and attention... which means it's not really safe to do in flight. Also right next to this thumbwheel are buttons for manipulating the IFE, so if you fat-finger you mess that up.

Dubious feature #1: the car scans the side of the road for speed limit signs and reports what it sees on the main panel (between the MFD and PFD, though there's an MFD mode to show the results with larger numbers) -- this would be convenient, except it's not remotely reliable. Most seriously, on several occasions in multiple places (two of them repeatably) it hallucinated clearly not_existing speed limit signs - 70 MPH on a side street, another 70 MPH in the middle of an intersection, and 55 MPH in a parking garage. It is not clear how often it might hallucinate more plausible but still wrong speed signs. Second, it often reports nothing (I am still not sure what causes it to forget the last sign it saw); and finally, it also has no ability to tell when it's moved to a different regime with different expected speed, so if you e.g. turn from a side street onto a busy main road it will continue to report 20 MPH until it sees something else. (The second and third points are not that significant for a driver but they're clearly far inadequate for any kind of self-driving.) Opportunity for ironing is lost by not displaying the information as a magenta line on the PFD.

Dubious feature #2: the car scans in front for traffic, and if it sees something it thinks you might be about to hit the MFD turns into an orange bar that says "BRAKE". This is a nice idea but has a number of problems in practice: first, the MFD is far enough down relative to the windscreen that if you're maintaining a proper visual scan, you can only see it turn orange in your peripheral vision, so it's more of a distraction than a help. Second, in heavy traffic it goes off regularly without need (this is not because I drive like a maniac in heavy traffic)... and third, sometimes it doesn't go off when in my estimation as a driver it should have, as in I need to (and do) ram on the brakes and it doesn't respond. Also, it's incapable of generating RAs with a horizontal component. I am in no way confident, based on my observations, that it could avoid rearending traffic if it were trying to drive itself.

Dubious feature #2a: the autopilot has a speed mode for following traffic in front of you. In light of the performance of the braking warning, I did not feel like trying this was prudent, and unlike other perhaps questionable autopilot modes it can't be tried out on an empty road.

Dubious feature #3: the car also watches for lane markings, and if it thinks you're drifting out of your lane, the MFD turns into a slightly different orange bar that says (I think) "Lane Departure". This has the same problem as the braking warning: to be effective it needs to be on a HUD, and, at least in the model I drove, there isn't a HUD. Furthermore, the MFD signal does not tell you which direction it thinks you're drifting in, or which direction it thinks you ought to turn. There's also a stick pusher element, but it is subtle and it's not readily interpreted to guess the direction either. (This might improve with experience, though.) This feature also generates a lot of false warnings: in my experience it triggered about half the time when changing lanes on a highway. Using the turn indicator or not correlates only weakly with a lower false warning rate. Furthermore, more seriously, on one occasion it got confused by the lane markings associated with an onramp, and on another it got confused by (I think) snowmelt and wanted to veer left into the next lane and collide with the other car already there. This would be a serious problem if it had been trying to drive itself.

Dubious feature #3a: the autopilot has a horizontal mode for lane following. The QRH (fortunately still on board, despite the car being a rental) stressed that you can't actually let go of the wheel. This is weird in practice (either you steer and end up fighting it, or don't steer and end up fighting it) -- also some cautious testing on an empty road revealed that at highway speeds on even a moderate turn it doesn't by itself generate enough turn to avoid triggering the lane departure warning. I did not try to find out whether it would in fact barge into the next lane at that point; that did not seem prudent even on an empty road.

Dubious feature #4: there's an MFD mode that reports what it thinks the driver attention level is. I never saw this drop below 100% even when driving totally on mental autopilot. Not impressed.

Dubious feature #5: the car had one of these pro-theft keys where you don't need to actually insert the key in the ignition, just have it nearby somewhere and push a button. Given that you need to take the key out anyway to open the car, I have no idea what the point of these is supposed to be but they have definitely proven to be a security hazard.

Dubious feature #6: like most cars now it has a "auto" headlights mode, with no feedback about whether this mode is actually engaged or not. All this does is train people not to check the headlight switch, with the result that cars driving without headlights are vastly more common than they were twenty years ago. I didn't have the opportunity to see what happened when the autolights come on during driving, but in the past other cars have invariably done an awful job of reporting what they did.

Dubious feature #7: A back-up camera is nice to have but it is no adequate substitute for actually being able to see out the back, like one could in the distant past.

Overall: I'll keep my steam gauges thankyouverymuch.

[3WE]

Seems very similar to the aviational debate of the two-edged sword.

Some wonderful situational awareness and super fast electronic helper ers.

Airbii that usually refuse to stall. An autopilot to fly the plane while you review the approach plate. An autopilot to fly a zero zero approach (or the 200 and a half on a night when you are VERY tired. A magenta line to lead you to Branson International versus Branson downtown (which both look like black holes with a flashing white and green beacon and a runway with a VASI).

Then pilots on a stormy ILS to 200 dick with the autopilot at 200 feet instead of grabbing yoke and throttles and doing a firmly intentioned go-around, other pilots pull up the whole time...and etc, etc. etc.

I have found the backup camera to be a most wondorous thing for parallel parking and trailer hitching...versus the modern stylish mirror which distorts reality and says things may be closer or farther away than they appear.

And actually, I like my STICKSHIFT although apparently most other Americans object so much that it's a challenge to find them.

[AnMariner]

You must be driving an American car. My European one had these features working brilliantly.
Per

[Sickbag]

So recently I've had the opportunity, if one can call it that, to drive (for several days) a late-model car with the latest in autopilots and cockpit automation. It is fairly rubbish. I'm not saying whose version, because I expect they're all much the same and I don't see any point in calling out manufacturers individually.

Also, there's no sign that these things will actually be able to drive themselves usefully anytime soon.

For background, the main panel has two sections: on the right, the PFD (aka speedometer); and on the left, a MFD that defaults to a tachometer but has assorted other settings. There's a thumbwheel on the yoke that controls the MFD; but for some reason instead of just cycling among the various displays there's a top-level menu display that you have to visit to change the display... which means it needs eyeballs and attention... which means it's not really safe to do in flight. Also right next to this thumbwheel are buttons for manipulating the IFE, so if you fat-finger you mess that up.

Dubious feature #1: the car scans the side of the road for speed limit signs and reports what it sees on the main panel (between the MFD and PFD, though there's an MFD mode to show the results with larger numbers) -- this would be convenient, except it's not remotely reliable. Most seriously, on several occasions in multiple places (two of them repeatably) it hallucinated clearly not_existing speed limit signs - 70 MPH on a side street, another 70 MPH in the middle of an intersection, and 55 MPH in a parking garage. It is not clear how often it might hallucinate more plausible but still wrong speed signs. Second, it often reports nothing (I am still not sure what causes it to forget the last sign it saw); and finally, it also has no ability to tell when it's moved to a different regime with different expected speed, so if you e.g. turn from a side street onto a busy main road it will continue to report 20 MPH until it sees something else. (The second and third points are not that significant for a driver but they're clearly far inadequate for any kind of self-driving.) Opportunity for ironing is lost by not displaying the information as a magenta line on the PFD.

Dubious feature #2: the car scans in front for traffic, and if it sees something it thinks you might be about to hit the MFD turns into an orange bar that says "BRAKE". This is a nice idea but has a number of problems in practice: first, the MFD is far enough down relative to the windscreen that if you're maintaining a proper visual scan, you can only see it turn orange in your peripheral vision, so it's more of a distraction than a help. Second, in heavy traffic it goes off regularly without need (this is not because I drive like a maniac in heavy traffic)... and third, sometimes it doesn't go off when in my estimation as a driver it should have, as in I need to (and do) ram on the brakes and it doesn't respond. Also, it's incapable of generating RAs with a horizontal component. I am in no way confident, based on my observations, that it could avoid rearending traffic if it were trying to drive itself.

Dubious feature #2a: the autopilot has a speed mode for following traffic in front of you. In light of the performance of the braking warning, I did not feel like trying this was prudent, and unlike other perhaps questionable autopilot modes it can't be tried out on an empty road.

Dubious feature #3: the car also watches for lane markings, and if it thinks you're drifting out of your lane, the MFD turns into a slightly different orange bar that says (I think) "Lane Departure". This has the same problem as the braking warning: to be effective it needs to be on a HUD, and, at least in the model I drove, there isn't a HUD. Furthermore, the MFD signal does not tell you which direction it thinks you're drifting in, or which direction it thinks you ought to turn. There's also a stick pusher element, but it is subtle and it's not readily interpreted to guess the direction either. (This might improve with experience, though.) This feature also generates a lot of false warnings: in my experience it triggered about half the time when changing lanes on a highway. Using the turn indicator or not correlates only weakly with a lower false warning rate. Furthermore, more seriously, on one occasion it got confused by the lane markings associated with an onramp, and on another it got confused by (I think) snowmelt and wanted to veer left into the next lane and collide with the other car already there. This would be a serious problem if it had been trying to drive itself.

Dubious feature #3a: the autopilot has a horizontal mode for lane following. The QRH (fortunately still on board, despite the car being a rental) stressed that you can't actually let go of the wheel. This is weird in practice (either you steer and end up fighting it, or don't steer and end up fighting it) -- also some cautious testing on an empty road revealed that at highway speeds on even a moderate turn it doesn't by itself generate enough turn to avoid triggering the lane departure warning. I did not try to find out whether it would in fact barge into the next lane at that point; that did not seem prudent even on an empty road.

Dubious feature #4: there's an MFD mode that reports what it thinks the driver attention level is. I never saw this drop below 100% even when driving totally on mental autopilot. Not impressed.

Dubious feature #5: the car had one of these pro-theft keys where you don't need to actually insert the key in the ignition, just have it nearby somewhere and push a button. Given that you need to take the key out anyway to open the car, I have no idea what the point of these is supposed to be but they have definitely proven to be a security hazard.

Dubious feature #6: like most cars now it has a "auto" headlights mode, with no feedback about whether this mode is actually engaged or not. All this does is train people not to check the headlight switch, with the result that cars driving without headlights are vastly more common than they were twenty years ago. I didn't have the opportunity to see what happened when the autolights come on during driving, but in the past other cars have invariably done an awful job of reporting what they did.

Dubious feature #7: A back-up camera is nice to have but it is no adequate substitute for actually being able to see out the back, like one could in the distant past.

Overall: I'll keep my steam gauges thankyouverymuch.

But apart from that did you enjoy Disneyland?

[ocelot]

But apart from that did you enjoy Disneyland?

Ha, I wish.