This looks like the "Sensing" feature that Honda has implemented on some of their other vehicles. I just bought a 2016 Accord that does the same thing -- there's a camera mounted on the windshield, another camera in the front grille, and a radar sensor on the front bumper.<p>Calling it "self-driving" is kind of a misnomer and I think the article kind of blows it out of proportion.<p>It will track the car in front of you and keep a safe following distance, keeping either the maximum cruise control speed you've set, or whatever speed the vehicle ahead of you is driving, whichever is slower. It will accelerate or brake accordingly. It will also attempt to stay in the lane by using the onboard cameras for tracking the lane markings.<p>The lane keeping assist is not nearly as autonomous as the article makes it out to be. It does not like to work on sharper curves on the freeway, for one -- the system will disengage and tell you to steer manually. It still wants you to keep your hands on the wheel. It must be looking for very very subtle movements on the wheel, because the system will yell at you if you take your hands off the wheel for longer than 10-15 seconds.<p>All in all it's a pretty cool feature for longer road trips (keeping in your lane can just get kind of tiring, even with cruise control) but it's not the sort of autonomous driving that the article here paints it out to be.
Americans could rather use a robot highway driving instructor.<p>"Consider moving over to the right line; you're driving at the speed limit, and a speeding car is approaching; you may confirm this in the rear-view mirror."<p>"I have detected that you came to a full stop at the end of a generous freeway entrance ramp in light traffic. Suggested future action: look over the shoulder as early as possible and match the speed of the traffic."<p>"Suddenly exiting out of the left lane is dangerous. Please know which exit you're supposed to take, watch for its approach early, and change lanes ahead of time. If you miss an exit, do not make a sudden, dangerous action. Look for an alternate route or U-turn starting at the next exit."
Just for comparison, you can get a Subaru Legacy Premium with Eyesight for $25,835 (or a Crosstrek for thereabouts, and an Outback for $2-3K more), since at least summer 2015. So nothing Honda are doing here is revolutionary technologically, they're just bringing the same technology to a new market ($5K cheaper), which is still something.<p>I highly recommend that if you invest in THIS technology that you go all in and get the blind spot detection and rear cross traffic alerts. I have had a Subaru with Eyesight for over six months now, and I don't regret buying it and definitely like the blind spot/cross traffic alerts, they're legitimately useful day to day.<p>I will say one downside of this system is what I call "alert fatigue" particularly lane drift warnings, ice warnings, traffic pulled away warnings, etc. You can disable many of these, but it would be my only whine.<p>I have had automatic braking pre-warn me a handful of times, but not had it activate yet except when I pulled into the garage and the dangling tennis ball confused it and even then it only slowed me slightly. You get a yellow warning then red, then brake, and most of the warnings are legitimate I am just ahead of them.<p>Lane keep assist and distance based cruise control are like crack. It feels like you just get on the freeway, push a few buttons, and the car almost drives itself.
The article really wants to compare with electric vehicles, for some reason. The subheading says "they are being snapped up faster than electrified vehicles." This is repeated in the article, which says the relevant options packages "are being snapped up at a far higher rate than electrified vehicles." Discussing the Q50's technology package and how many buyers opt for it, it says "That’s three times as many people who pay extra to buy a hybrid-electric version."<p>What's the deal? Is this just because Tesla happens to be the one with the best system at the moment? It doesn't make any sense to me, and really distracts from the article's main thrust.
The real problem with self-driving cars is the car to human handoff. Over the long term it's incredible unlikely that humans will be any good <i>at</i> <i>all</i> at remaining aware and 'up to speed' on the current situation in the event that the car needs to give control back to the driver due to road conditions, hardware failure, or sudden situation that it cannot contend with.
In the early 2000's, I was hanging out sometimes in western North Carolina, and there was this young woman who has in the habit of getting together with some friends and driving around the clock to get to Colorado and back on short trips, instead of flying. I'm wondering if this technology isn't going to be used for such purposes.
Conversations about self-driving have focused on zero defect rate in-city self-driving vehicles, but a lot of these technologies are reaching Pareto-efficient levels of usefulness. I don't need my car to drive the first and last miles; I'd be perfectly happy if it just drove on the highway.<p>And why do humans drive long haul trucks for anything other than the first and last miles? Trucks should drive themselves between depots at the edges of metros and then humans can drive them into the city. <a href="https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/the-long-haul-truck-of-the-future/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/th...</a> "Self steering"... How long before that moniker is replaced by "Self driving".<p>And why are humans delivering packages? They might not be for long: <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-starship-delivery-robot-idUSKBN0U30ES20151220" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/us-starship-delivery-robot-id...</a><p>It's going to shock our economy once industries begin constraining roles to the level at which robots can be "good enough". After figuring out how to manage them, we'll start to see robots deployed in force.<p>As parents, my wife and I are talking about this a lot as we think about how to raise our kids (and we are emphatically hands-off parents)...
The elephant in the room is this one:<p>When will highways be upgraded/updated for self driving? I don't mean V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) capabilities, but properly painted <i>and</i> maintained lane lines, reflectors, and signage. The infrastructure is just not there. You can't simply rely on a car's sensing abilities for self driving.
Am I missing something? Why is this top news? There are several cars out there with adaptive cruise control. In fact, I think most mainstream cars offer it as an option now. It's pretty impressive but calling it "self-driving" is hyperbole.<p>Subaru's eyesight is technically even more impressive considering it does image processing to detect vehicles, whereas most of these systems are based on radar. Although I don't see the point because radar is more reliable IMO. Unless you use some features which only camera can provide (stop at traffic lights?), which Subaru doesn't yet do. From whatever research I did before buying a car, Volvo's system (uses both radar and camera) seems to be one of the best overall, along with Mercedes, and Subaru being a close third.
I'm curious about whether this is going to be a net win or lose for safety.<p>If users treat these automated cruise systems as a "magic self-driving device" when it can potentially make mistakes or hand back control when it's confused, drivers are going to die.<p>If people "really want to look at their cell phones", and they take this as the tool that lets them pay no attention to the road, it better be up to that task.
The title is a bit misleading. I have a 2016 Civic Touring that has the Sensing Package. It's effectively a sensor package (cameras in the top-middle of the windshield and below passenger-side headlight) with integration with the steering and powertrain systems and very basic logic.<p>When you turn it on the car basically tries to stay in your lane by looking at the lines on the road. It actually tells you when it can and cannot see the lines. When it detects you going outside of the lane (without using your signal) it takes control of steering and corrects for you. You can also set it to stay within some distance of the car in front of you and it will control your speed. Supposedly, it will also auto-brake if you are in danger of collision but I haven't had a chance to test that yet (and hope not to have to).<p>The whole thing is more like a driver assistance system and if you take your hands off the wheel for more than 15 seconds or so a bunch of alerts start going off and the system disengages. After using it for a few months I think this is probably a good idea. There are quite a few places in the SF Bay area that have worn out and faded lines on the road and once the system loses sight of the lane markers it just stops working. Not a great moment to have your hands off the wheel or your eyes closed. ;-)<p>For the price its incredible that Honda offers something like this. Suburu offers something similar but the next best thing is buying a Tesla for much more. I treat it sort of as insurance on long trips. If I start dozing off or am distracted the system keeps me in check but it is not reliable enough to be truly autonomous. So yeah, it can sort of drive autonomously.<p>As a preview of the future it gives me hope and it's possible this may be the last car I actually buy (when cars drive themselves it could very well become a service industry).
This is a interesting proposition for Honda, but really not that new. Even the price is not /that/ new.<p>In fact, this is technology that has been sold at around the same price point in the industrial transportation sector -- think of logistics and lorries -- for quite a while. This is where the majority of the innovation is taking place.<p>For example, just this week it has been revealed that the UK Govt will likely to announcing tomorrow funding for driverless truck convoys in the North of England. What's the price differential between these intelligent trucks and regular trucks? $0.<p>In fact, so much innovation is taking place in the industrial sector that just last week Toyota announced that it has hired the FULL workforce of Jaybridge Robotics, a firm that specializes in autonomous industrial vehicles, mainly in the agricultural sector.<p>If you want to understand the tailwinds in the sector, follow the b2b and industrial segment of the market. Technologies and trends are already starting to filter down.<p>--<p>I also want to plug my email newsletter Driverless Weekly (<a href="http://driverlessweekly.com" rel="nofollow">http://driverlessweekly.com</a>) while I'm at it. It's a once-weekly summary of the top news stories in the autonomous vehicles sector.
I've owned three cars with automatic cruise control for the past decade. This isn't exactly new technology, perhaps only at this price point.<p>The first car I had with this, an '06 Infiniti, was only able to slow to a crawl, not a full stop. So while it was useful on the highway it was useless in stop and start.<p>The second car, a '11 BMW, added "Stop & Go" to the formula. Great? Not quite. What would happen is that the car would come to a full stop, and then a timer would run, and if the car didn't start moving again within 10 seconds the cruise control would shut off, and to resume you'd have to push the pedal. This was especially maddening when stop & start traffic is inconsistent and the stops last 10.5 seconds. Basically the idea of being able to set & forget was completely undermined by this and driving with the feature on was more stressful than driving with it off and just doing everything manually. A complete bust. I don't know why it does this but I can see it being some combination of the product team needing to ship the feature in the state it was in, and legal requirements.<p>The problem with both of these implementations is that they promised to alleviate some of the issues with past "auto-drive" features (and you should consider Cruise Control to be the very first auto drive feature), but introduce their own. If you want the user experience of set & forget, you need very predictable conditions if you want any of these mass market systems to work for you, and unfortunately that's just not the way the roads are.<p>I think I have the feature in my latest car too, but I've given up and decided to enjoy manually driving, and just wait for fully autonomous vehicles.
How do we as drivers keep up with the rising levels of automation? It's challenging but doable for owners, but imagine jumping from a pain old 1990s car into a flashy new rental with all the bells and whistles... With a bit of exaggeration, one might make a case for individual type rating, like airliner pilots need to have.<p>Before we reach fully autonomous driving, we might see an age of widespread "car illiteracy", with more and more people who have a driver's license, but who have completely lost touch with the state of the art in car UI concepts. With not enough time on automatic transmission, people here in Europe occasionally even struggle with something as simple as park/neutral/reverse/drive (don't ask my where I got that)
Sounds like these cars are far from self driving. Just some added safety features that resemble self driving but, are dangerous to use without a foot near the break and hands on the wheel.<p>I think this sentence pretty much says it all, "For instance, some owners have posted videos of hands- and foot-free driving on YouTube and the car inevitably makes a mistake.".<p>It sounds like these features are going to end up being abused and probably causing serious fatalities. As we have seen people want to txt and even watch movies while driving. These new features will allow wreck less drivers to pay less attention to driving and more attention to how many Instagram followers they have.<p>I'll be sure to pay more attention to people driving Honda civics when I'm on the highway.
This looks like the same functionality the Tesla Model S has. One of the big draws for the new Model S cars. So much so that people are getting rid of their older Teslas because they did not have the autopilot.<p>I thought it's only a matter of time before autopilot becomes common place but it looks like its happening sooner than I thought. The good thing is this has nothing to do with the car being electric or not. But the main thing is, if Tesla thought its going to be a differentiator in terms of calling their cars "luxury" its going to be a problem for them. Given that the internals of the Model S itself are not particularly luxorious they need to think about it.
There was a startup that for $10,000 it was a third party option package that was self driving. I wonder how it is doing with all these car companies that create their own options for self-driving.
I have yet to drive a "self-driving" or even "self-monitoring" car and the thought of doing so terrifies me. I know technology is good and it can do great things, but helping me drive is something I don't enjoy the idea of. What happens if, however unlikely, someone were to hack my car? They could potentially crash my car and leave without a trace. I think we really need to take a step back and ask if the benefits outweigh the potential costs/risks.
> The Obama administration has proposed spending $4 billion to accelerate autonomous-car technology during the next decade.<p>Hmm, what are they spending it on? There's a lot of money being spent on developing this technology already by multiple private companies. I assume it's for something else...<p>IMO government research money should go into stuff that private industry is unwilling to fund, like pure math, theoretical physics/CS, and other things that have very long-term yield/results timelines.
It might take a while before self driving is widely available, but self stopping is here today. It's now standard equipment in all new Mercedes -- including cars selling for about $30k. I have an entry-level Mercedes and it includes blind spot radar, lane tracking, and collision avoidance that will stop your car automatically if you're distracted or incapacitated. These features are available widely from most automakers now.
The conversation on this HN thread makes me wonder about the future generation who will never learn how to drive.<p>And then I feel sorry for the generation in between who will be confused with automatic driving happening only sometimes.<p>Such interruptive learning or even worse, never having learned, has the power to change culture for the worst.
The impending dawn of the autonomous car era is the reason why I am not marching on Washington for rail investment.<p>This is really one time where cynical cheapskate politics may hasten rapid, positive societal change.
the self driving car is a concept I have a hard time appreciating. It sounds cool, and offers enormous technological and legislative obstacles to overcome, yet I can't figure out the fundamental problem they will solve - compared to the attention they get. For any use case I can imagine (minus the cool factor) we either have more efficient solutions already, or there are better alternatives to investigate. Plus I figure, most people still like to drive.
I'm impressed, I'm much more relaxed than before - and that means I'm actually able to just look ahead and think about the road, not about what I'm doing.
Curiously I'd rather pay a premium for a car that can park itself flawlessly. Or drive itself around town while I am busy doing things in said town.
If it's a much cheaper car than the alternatives, would the self-driving capability be implemented with lower-quality hardware and/or software?
From the article: <i>"as long as lane markings remain visible and another vehicle is in front of the car."</i> That's more like platooning, which was demoed two decades ago in Demo 97 [1], than self-driving. Are there more details about how this works, especially about autopilot disconnect and user takeover? Tesla's system is known to have trouble with offramps.[2] (Tesla customers are very forgiving. "It's a beta", one says in their forum.)<p>Honda's follow-the-leader system avoids some of Tesla's problems. Radar systems for not rear-ending the car ahead are already pretty good, and many are already on the road. Lane following by lane markings isn't that reliable, but restricting it to following the car ahead handles traffic jams nicely while locking out most of the hard cases.<p>The deployment of self-driving systems which are much dumber than Google's is worrisome. I've written before of the "deadly valley" of automated driving. This is another "deadly valley" system. The deadly valley begins where the driver can take their hands off the wheel and tune out. It ends where the automated system can correctly handle more situations than a human driver.<p>Google is trying hard to get to the far side of the deadly valley. That's good. Look at the problems they're having. Their only known fender-bender in autonomous mode was when the vehicle was trying to deal with a drain blocked with sandbags and very slowly maneuvered around it, to be hit by a bus, while in a wide lane at a right turn, because the AI misjudged the likely behavior of the bus driver. Google's dealing with the hard edge cases. Cruise, on the other hand, ran into a parked car in San Francisco when the autopilot lost lane tracking, veered left, overcorrected right, and the driver took back control too late. That's a more basic failure.<p>It also shows the problem with semi-autonomous systems. Expecting the driver to compensate for failures of the automation will not work.<p>Volvo Car Group President and CEO Håkan Samuelsson says that the company will accept full liability whenever one of its cars is in autonomous mode.[3] He has it right. This needs to be a requirement before the "move fast and break things" crowd gets on the road.<p>nonmarked-ramp
[1] <a href="http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/.../pavements/.../publicroads/97july/demo97.cfm" rel="nofollow">http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/.../pavements/...</a>
[2] <a href="https://forums.teslamotors.com/de_DE/forum/forums/careful-when-using-autopilot-" rel="nofollow">https://forums.teslamotors.com/de_DE/forum/forums/careful-wh...</a>
[3] <a href="http://fortune.com/2015/10/07/volvo-liability-self-driving-cars/" rel="nofollow">http://fortune.com/2015/10/07/volvo-liability-self-driving-c...</a>