
Ask HN: Status of “self-driving” vehicles for mostly *highway* driving? - irregular-john
Five to six times a year, I drive 800 miles round-trip to my childhood home. 99% of this route is effectively a straight line. Every time I drive this route, I think to myself, &quot;Shit, I&#x27;m not even that great an engineer, and <i>I</i> could automate this,&quot; and proceed to loathe the remainder of the drive. What are my options for automating this portion of the drive?<p>I am a big believer in the idea of automating this &quot;boring&quot; 99%, and re-engaging a human for the remaining, much-more-difficult 1%.
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runjake
I have a 2018 Honda with Lane Assist and Adaptive Cruise Control. I commute
about 24 miles each day between the city and my home on a rural highway. I've
also taken a few 2 hour late-night trips up and down the Interstate.

First off, it is awesome. It largely works remarkably well. As I mentioned,
I've made a few of those 2 hour I-5 trips, albeit late at night when the
traffic is virtually nil. But pretty much the only steering I did was a quick
jiggle of the steering wheel to shut off the driver attention alerts.

It was utterly remarkable. The car autonomously drove itself for almost the
entire two hours.

But it has its shortcomings. It is not a relatively simply engineering
challenge. Roads have to be relatively well-marked for the Lane Assist to work
well. LA gets confused when the Sun is low on the horizon and shining just
right into the sensor. Heaby rain and ice often interfere with the sensors.
Sometimes there's a weird marking or an on-ramp and LA wants to drive me into
a barrier. I keep a mental catalog of the sections of the highways where this
occurs. Also, the ACC sometimes like to brake way, way too hard or jerky. Most
of the time it's good, but sometimes it really lays on the brakes.

Now, when I drive other cars, I feel minor annoyance at having to steer and
maintain a safe driving distance. It's something that's super useful and an
enhancement to driving. But I wouldn't dare trust it or take my eyes off the
road.

A truly successful system would need a variety of sensor inputs
(visual/mwave/ultrasonic/etc). You would need software that takes the data
collected by all those sensors and correlates it into a bigger picture and
then makes life-or-death decisions based on many, many highly-variable
factors.

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jryan49
There are plenty of cars with lane assist technology and adaptive cruise
control ([https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/lane-departure-
wa...](https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/lane-departure-warning-
lanehttps://news.ycombinator.com/news-keeping-assist-guide/)).

It terms of how good they are I feel like you'd actually have to test drive it
yourself. Maybe rent a car with the feature next time you go back home?

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godot
That link seems broken but there's also this list:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cruise_control_syst...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cruise_control_system)

For OP: jrayn49 is right. Just pick a car with both adaptive cruise control
plus lane keep assist. Quality of both features vary by model.

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cimmanom
Isn’t that basically what adaptive cruise control is?

