Vehicles doing unpredictable things are simply broken.
The 04 R1 I used to ride had a goofy double throttle system where the cable directly drove the first set of intake butterflies, but a duplicate set downstream was computer controlled via servo. This was the generation that introduced catalytic converters to bikes, and I presumed the intention was to limit throttle opening rates via computer overriding what the rider had done when opened too quickly. Conventionally that transient pressure drop situation is handled by throwing a bunch of excess fuel into the air stream to not hesitate and stumble from most the fuel falling out of suspension and clinging to the walls, i.e. they were cleaning up emissions.
Even this seemingly benign and dead-stupid bit of a computer override almost caused me to crash on multiple occasions. If the rider opened the throttle aggressively far beyond where the servo operated throttle was at, and immediately began dialing it back to reduce the acceleration, the servo operated throttle would continue opening to meet the still more open cable operated throttle's position. So rider is telling bike to accelerate less, and bike is accelerating more in a game of computer catch up. This is not only very unexpected on a naturally aspirated ICE, but outright dangerous on a nearly 200HP sportbike.
At least it was relatively trivial to remove the plates from the servo actuated throttle shaft and let the computer keep pointlessly twisting a bare shaft.
I still think it's absolutely insane that for aviation we require everything to be formally verified, while cars don't have any such thing and can brick themselves via over-the-air updates at any time.
And that ignores the even more complex problem of self-driving which is something even aviation, which has a lot less opportunities for external errors, doesn't even try to tackle.
Some early traction control systems in cars used the same double-throttle setup. I presume this is just the simplest way to slap a feature like that on as an afterthought.
At least on cars there's usually so much mass and aggregate mechanical sloppiness present you probably wouldn't notice.
The R1 didn't so much as accelerate as it teleported at wide throttle angles in 1st gear, combined with no squishy rubber isolation bits adding mechanical latency to the system. The phenomenon was very apparent and nerve-wracking in the right conditions.
I am not confusing anything. The system I describe was used, for instance, in several BMW models from the 1990s. It’s sucks and it disappeared fairly quickly, in lieu of the other much better systems you list.
The excessively (and negatively) complicated addons described in the thread are not inherent to ICE cars. Take any car from 80s or 90s and the behavior is predictable and simple. It's only into the 00s that manufacturers started making things too complex and as a consequence, fragile and unpredictable.
I dunno, even the simplest of many-cylinder Otto-cycle ICEs is still a Rube Goldberg machine. Especially in aggregate with the transmission necessary for making usable the relatively narrow rpm range, fuel tank/system, exhaust, emissions/catalyst, they're all over the place.
Same throttle opening delay system could be present in a fully drive-by-wire system. Keeping it partially mechanical allows for instant, not computer altered, closing of the valve.
"Vehicles doing unpredictable things are simply broken."
They should result in corporate manslaughter charges ahainst the manufacturer.
If we let this slide, a JavaScript library with 100 known vulnerabilities will be running on 10 year old kernel controlling your breaks and then you will get 'oops, something went wrong!' Message and die because you car started mining buttcoin
That sounds like a nightmare. What was the rationale for having a split control system like that? If preventing snaps of wide open throttle were the goal, then having the butterflies both servo controlled would accomplish that right?
Wait, when you say "downstream" do you mean the butterflies were in series on the same intake path? I'm trying to visualize what a small time delay and rate mismatch would look like here.
Top notch ASCII art there, thanks. Yeah, I'm no combustion engineer or anything, but I just can't see what would motivate a system like that. I suppose the rider has the ability to snap the throttle shut instantly, but you could achieve the same with a limit plate on the same set of butterflies that are servo-controlled. So when you open it up, you're both electonically telling the ECU what you want, and mechanically allowing the range of motion. When you snap the throttle shut, you're forcing the intakes closed. Computer gets to limit the rate of opening and coordinate the fuel, rider still gets to close it as fast as they please.
What you're describing would still suffer from the same "catch-up" problem though, assuming the same control software.
It's worth noting later versions of YCC-T are servo-actuated using a single throttle shaft. This early version was probably just something slapped on at the last minute using off-the-shelf components, and they didn't refine the control software enough to do things like at least resync the logical servo position with the cable throttle position when the rider has started closing the throttle from an overshoot position. It was just a very naive rate-limiting filter of sorts where the servo is continuously chasing the actual throttle's instantaneous position.
The experience occasionally resembled a laggy high boost turbo car where tq keeps increasing despite a shrinking throttle open %. Kind of amusing in a car, Tesla FSD levels of idiotic on a ~1000hp/ton bike.
The 2012 Kawasaki ZX14-R had an identical system, but it was non problematic. It would artificially limit throttle opening below 3500 rpm but I didn't mind that. The idle speed of the motorcycle was 35 mph, so I just used the clutch only at low speed to control the vehicle. This was much safer and the engine wouldn't get over 200 F even in stop and go traffic.
Yamaha for some reason can't get the fueling right, even to this day. Kawasaki gets it right and meets the same emissions standards. It's not a fundamental issue with ride-by-wire, it's quality of implementation.
There's a reason Rossi insisted on his M1 stay carbureted for years while Yamaha was shipping the ycc-t junk on the R1. It was quite public and controversial at the time. Obviously Yamaha was pressuring him to market their ycc-t by winning races with it, but he kept rejecting it after testing and kept dominating motogp using carbs instead.
Out of curiosity I tried digging up information surrounding the continued use of carburetors on the M1 while the R1 was shipping w/EFI, considering there were multiple articles written at the time including quotes from Rossi. But this was all I could find:
That's just crazy, motorcycles require smooth and predictable acceleration. I like to rip on my bike but a sudden surge of power could really screw you up in certain conditions. That is why I always say when you get a new bike ride it like a beginner for a long time and slowly build up how aggressively you ride it. They all seem to have slight personalities so going slow is the way to go at first.
Ugh. I had a bike that liked to stumble when cold, and it's exciting when leaned into a corner to leave the traffic lights and lose most of your power. These things are kind of important.
Yeah that's problematic. A 500cc track bike I had came with primitive slide carburetors lacking any sort of accelerator pump by design. Cold or hot that thing would fall on its face if you were too ham-fisted with the throttle at low RPMs. But at least it was deterministic at this, and you quickly learned to not do that. On the track you're never down so low in RPMs so maybe it even made sense from a KISS perspective.
I got rid of a Mercedes C class for this exact same reason, it tried to kill me - twice - and that was enough for me. No more automatic brakes on my cars, the risks don't seem to outweigh the advantages. At least Honda seems to be responsible enough to address this. According to MB there was absolutely nothing wrong with my car, it was 'operating as designed'.
Mercedes treated me similarly. I had a brand new sprinter van. The power braking fluid lines exploded just after I got off the highway. I got extremely lucky it didn't happen 5 seconds earlier than it did. Turns out they use plastic rings instead of metal ones and it turns out it happens to lots of people. They refused to buy back the vehicle. I wanted to sue them but I've got too much stuff on my plate, or so I tell myself. Needless to say, I lost a lot of trust in them and (perhaps stupidly) sold the van shortly afterwards.
> Needless to say, I lost a lot of trust in them and (perhaps stupidly) sold the van shortly afterwards.
I know this is very off-topic but don't beat yourself up about making quick decisions like this that cut that kind of persistent, simmering rage out of your life.
We have enough of this stuff with people in our lives, often unavoidably, so letting appliances/devices/products cause it is not something we have to tolerate. If a _thing_ makes you feel unsatisfiable anger, get rid of it.
Very good advice. Vote with your feet and move on. Life really is too short, if MB wants to burn their brand more power to them. I bought a 25 year old car and had it rebuilt end-to-end, this cost a bit but the result is fine. No electronics other than ECU and some minor bits like ABS and pretty reliable. It will outlast me.
I bought a (really cheap, hybrid) resonator guitar about 15 years ago. It wasn't very expensive, it _looked_ really cool (great headstock). But I couldn't get a sound out of it I liked, and over time the resonator became difficult to "tune" or maintain. And I felt sort of guilty and stupid for buying it.
I couldn't get on with the thing, but I felt bad about selling it to anyone because the resonator was more trouble than it was worth. Some frustrations should not be sold on.
So I kept the very nice guitar case, and gave the guitar away to a talented, broke musician, who used its rather scratchy, broken sound for effect on a couple of recordings.
I could have sold it for a few quid but I have never regretted this; I turned my frustration at this thing into a gift and a bit of joy for someone else and then moved on.
Not something I'd recommend everyone does regularly, because if we all do it, it just prolongs poor product design by failing to reject it, but it helped this one time.
(It also taught me an important lesson about musical instruments; the next guitar I bought was better, but more basic in appearance and already scratched from the shop.)
You probably did the right thing -- life is short.
I had a similar experience and called an attorney, who explained that, in the U.S., you can really only sue for any actual loss (whether to the vehicle or to you). If you weren't injured or killed, and didn't suffer extreme anxiety or something like that, then you suffered no real loss and really have nothing to sue over (unfortunately). You can't sue for what might have happened, only for what actually did. (You probably could have sued, at least in small claims, for the loss of use, cost of repairs, decrease in value, etc, if you wanted to take the time.)
With that said, you might have been able to get them to take it back under your state's lemon law, if you hadn't already sold it, but the lemon laws generally only cover multiple defects over a period of time anyway. :(
Yikes. I remember when my dad bought the first fly-by-wire car and even back then I was kinda spooked by it but accepted that adults knew what they were doing. The funny thing is that our next door neighbour bought the same car and the computer saved his life when a semi-transport truck merged into him and it took over the wheel.
I'm still on team "put computers into cars" for the long term benefit of ending routine automotive collisions but the medium term is frightening.
The term "fly by wire" refers to the lack of mechanical linkage between the operator controls and the flight control surfaces. Cars have gone through similar design changes, yes. The car accelerator no longer opens valves/injectors for the gasoline to enter combustion chambers.
In both cases - aircraft and cars - the primary goal was reducing weight.
But this term is not intended to refer to driver-assistance features.
> The car accelerator no longer opens valves/injectors for the gasoline to enter combustion chambers.
The part you're thinking of is the throttle (which is why the accelerator pedal is sometimes called the throttle pedal), which controls the flow of air into the engine.
The flow of gasoline has always been automated as a derived value from this (and often, other factors) -- even when engines were entirely mechanical; this was the function of the carburetor.
That's not universally true for internal combustion engines. Many old diesels had a "rack" that was tied to a system of levers. Each lever controlled a single fuel injector. The throttle cable was tied to this rack.
Because diesels (even modern) don't use throttle plates. They control power entirely through fuel metering, as predetonation is not an issue given the the more robust cylinder design and nature of diesel fuel.
Some diesels use so called J-brakes which effectively function as throttle plates to induce engine braking, but they are exclusively for slowing down the vehicle.
> In both cases - aircraft and cars - the primary goal was reducing weight.
That wikipedia article is a lot of unsourced nonsense written by complete idiots who clearly lack subject-area knowledge
The goal for drive-by-wire in cars was primarily emissions reduction. Many cars "smooth" throttle inputs to improve mileage and emissions. In some cars "eco" mode exaggerates that smoothing, or changes the mapping of the throttle to allow for much more control over a lower portion of the throttle range. In others, "drive" is smoothed, and "sport" mode is not (unfortunately "sport" mode often makes the transmission far too aggressive.)
It brings mechanical simplicity, because cruise control can be integrated in.
Drive by wire throttles were notoriously unreliable for almost a decade after their introduction. They get gummed up, the actuators fail, the position sensors fail, etc. It's a laugh that the article claims they're "easier to service" - they're usually buried in difficult-to-access places and there's nothing "serviceable" about them compared to a true mechanical throttle that can usually be completely rebuilt.
Correct. The whole idea was to decouple the accelerator pedal from the throttle using a sensor, a computer and an actuator to ensure that the right amount of fuel/air would be passed into the engine.
If you don't do that then the excess fuel goes back out unburned. Multi point injection has changed this process a bit in that compared to the first single point injection systems the fuel is mixed with the air on a per-cylinder basis leading to better fuel economy and even more efficient combustion. This is also why these systems have air mass sensors, the amount of air is an important thing to measure in order to determine the right amount of fuel. Essentially fuel injection systems they have all of the complexity of a servo system, and the number of failure points compared to a direct linkage is huge, especially when you have a block that is split into two cylinder banks, V or Boxer.
If not for many years of pingpong I probably would have smashed into a bridge support. Crap car. The situation is a bridge with two steel supports rising up with a 2 ton weight on top to lift the bridge, apparently the radar return of the posts is such that the radar interprets it as an imminent frontal collision if you pass between the two posts. And then immediately hits the brakes, hard.
Second time was in a bend, with a big sign on the far side of the bend (me on the inner lane). Same stuff. If there had been oncoming traffic I would have certainly hit it because the car became uncontrollable instantly.
Wow that is bonkers. Do you think Musk is right about the audiovisual-only approach to self-driving automotives? I must say I rarely disagree with his thinking when it comes to physics and computer science, but that was one of the few times I thought he was wrong and I'm still not sure, but your story does make for a compelling piece of evidence.
If we had Scifi style millimeter wave radar (I'm thinking 'Snow Crash' (book) style stuff) that gave the computer a surface shape and 'signature' model to think about? That'd probably be the safest since it's better than human vision ever could be, though it'd still be tough since humans are analog supercomputers that are well versed in traversing 3.5 dimensions of space and the advanced memory and hazard prediction elements really help.
Vision based computer systems really need the persistence and object recognition factors. A strong specialized faked intelligence might be sufficient, more so if it's less distracted than humans.
I'd love to see something like Knight Visions. Even if it were just an IR overlay, in a way that looked natural, and was smaller/lighter/better FOV than traditional NVGs. The mm-wave part would be great too!
The car was thrown into a spin the first time because it was on a bridge with a very uneven and slippery surface. Really, I'm sure it was 'the perfect storm' for that particular emergency braking system but I would rather trust myself than to gamble on tech that fails twice within a year for such a critical function.
There isn't a whole lot of room on those bridges for evasive maneuvers either.
On the other hand the IIHS says the MB C-Class has a fatality rate of zero, from 2015-2017, the latest data available. They must have done something right.
That rate is for the 4WD version. The 2WD version has a fatality rate of 28.
Now I'm going to assume that adding the 4WD option to your sedan isn't that good at increasing safety. Yeah, more driving wheels does improve control and will probably reduce fatalities. But from 28 dpm to 0 is going to also be attributable to statistical noise. (Case in point, IIHS' 2014 statistics have the 4WD version at 25, and the 2WD at 11).
Also note that the death rate is in terms of deaths per million registration years and only includes the driver of the car. So for the C-Class, which sold about 80k units in 2014, one driver death in a 3-year span would be a '4' on the rate. The intervals on this data are very wide, and every year relatively low-volume cars will score a '0' just by statistical chance.
A factor to increase noise on the four wheel drive version of the C class is that 4WD saloons and estates[1] just aren't that common, it's a niche option for those types of car. Checking a UK second hand car sales site for a non scientific survey, it seems about 1 in 10 C classes for sale have the option (these ratios will probably differ between markets of course).
I don't know if that's really true in the U.S. where people have an irrational attraction to AWD. Looking at the pre-owned inventory of my nearest M-B dealer two thirds of it is 4Matic cars, only one third RWD.
these systems remind me of when i think it was volvo put on a demo press event thing to promote their new auto-breaking systems and the car just straight up drove into the back of the semi truck under ideal conditions. either it was a thing to drum up some news stories under the "there is no such thing as bad press coverage" or they demoed it way before it was ready.
Why did we think it would be a good idea to stick a computer between the brake pedal and the physics equation?
Passive systems like ABS are pretty much the only thing I have ever found value in, and even then it's been a mixed bag when operating near limits. Never heard of a car locking up on the freeway because an ABS fuse went out...
> Why did we think it would be a good idea to stick a computer between the brake pedal and the physics equation?
Because human beings have such a terrible track record that even "dumb" computers running code written by shabby programmers can do better. Even with these errors the computers are still doing a better job. The NIH studied Automatic Emergency Braking systems and found that, "With a 100% market penetration rate, fatalities could be reduced by 13.2%, and injuries could be reduced by 9.1%."
When a human does something stupid, it's the humans fault. The human has to accept responsibility. When a computer does something stupid, who is to blame? How are they held accountable?
When the computer fails its job it is the same responsibility as any other car component when it fails to do its job. You are responsibile unless you can shift the blame to the manufacturer or a mechanic or God. Nothing new, same as air bags going off when they shouldn't.
It's a tradeoff. My rental car recently had the fancy modern lane-centering, radar cruise control, etc. I found the car-following radar cruise control to be really nice on a 5 hour drive, but the lane centering was garbage, and I just couldn't get used the drive-by-wire steering. I still prefer to actually be in control of my vehicle.
That said... I had the rental because of an accident that would have been avoided if my own car had frontal collision detection and automatic braking. Assuming it had worked.
We borrowed a 2020 4Runner to haul a camper on a 300 mile drive, and the radar-enabled cruise control was really nice on that trip both ways. Seemed like it did a good job of breaking early enough to keep it only providing mild input, but it wasn't super distracting or anything. Also possible that any input from the automatic trailer break controller overshadowed the what the cruise control was doing.
It either didn't have lane-centering or it was disabled, but I think in general that's a way more noticeable input than braking. If you have a weird input in steering (ie, a strong gust of wind) your instinct is to steer the opposite way, but in general I think most people that have weird input with acceleration/braking tend to respond with just braking universally.
I had it in my Nissan Leaf - the cruise control was great, but the lane following felt like I was a bowling ball in a game with bumpers. It wanted to just bounce back and forth off the sides of the lanes.
I actually agree with your question, but allow me to play devil’s advocate, perhaps.
We only have 1 side of this story - that a few people have been surprised and had accidents. We don’t have the stats on how many people the active braking has saved from a collision. (BTW I have a CRV, and have experienced sudden braking myself, both with and without something in front of me, but it hasn’t caused an accident yet.)
ABS is a computer between the brake and the physics, and there’s widespread agreement about the benefits of this arrangement. So maybe the problem isn’t the computer, or the idea to use them in the loop. Maybe the problem is an incomplete understanding of people, or maybe it’s just a sensor defect or manufacturing issue. (Which, I would agree, absolutely should be considered when plugging things into a computer controller.)
We have lots of computers in the physics loop, and very few of them give any of us pause. ECUs are standard these days and are critical to fuel efficiency and reducing environmental impact. Self driving cars are on the way and are a whole new level of computer control. I think I’m still in favor of self-driving cars and the potential they have to reduce traffic, collisions, and environmental impact...
> We don’t have the stats on how many people the active braking has saved from a collision.
In the article, there were several links at the bottom with stats on the impact on Volvo cars in the US: https://www.iihs.org/topics/bibliography/ref/2111.
The stats aren't directly equivalent, but I think it helps to support your argument.
> Assume you are traveling down the 405 at 80mph during rush hour.
Okay, bad driving choice there. You are 1.5x more likely to die in a collision driving 80mph than if you were driving the speed limit (65mph), since collision energy is proportional to velocity squared. ;)
Worst case for ABS failure vs emergency braking failure? Seems like both can easily result in death, and I don’t see reasons yet to believe one is more likely than the other. We probably have a lot more data on the number of deaths lack of ABS has caused over the years than computer braking systems, and the good news is that we can fix computer braking systems right now and forever.
The big difference here is control, not outcome. Having brakes seize suddenly is surprising, whereas going from static to dynamic friction when slamming on the brakes isn’t very surprising. Of course we strive to minimize surprise, and of course it’s preferable if cars don’t slam on the brakes without cause.
Unexpected surprises can be dangerous. I feel like safety related systems really should be as simple as possible.
I like ABS but in one of my vehicles I had an issue with it randomly engaging when it shouldn't due to rusted and cracked tone rings. It's actually pretty scary losing the majority of your braking power when you desperately need it.
> It's actually pretty scary losing the majority of your braking power when you desperately need it.
Agreed. It's bad both ways. I would say the more dangerous failure mode is the one which results in the most unexpected amount of delta between input and output.
If you are already in the process of trying to stop, there is going to be some finite difference between expectation and reality, even if the braking system does not perform perfectly (or at all). Your brain is already thinking "ok let's find a way to slow this thing down". You might have a few precious milliseconds to go for a shoulder or other external soft-stop opportunity.
If you are inputting zero braking signal and receive a 100% stop force arbitrarily, that is pretty much an infinite level of surprise. Incidentally, this may also provoke any adjacent ABS failure modes.
Back in the last century, we had these levers called emergency brakes. Then they went to parking brake pedals. Now parking brakes are on a button. I want the lever back.
> > Why did we think it would be a good idea to stick a computer between the brake pedal and the physics equation?
> I think it's a great idea for the driver behind me to have such a system. It makes them less likely to rear-end me.
Yes. But it's a scary idea for the driver in front of you to have such a system. If they (their car) suddenly goes into hard braking for no visible reason on the highway, you might be rear-ending them.
So now it's just an arms race where everyone else has to get a newer car to avoid getting drawn into unprovoked accidents caused by bugs in other cars software?
This happened to my shortly after I bought a 2018 Accord. I'm on the interstate in the fast lane with a pickup off my front quarter. There had been construction in the area recently and they hadn't cleaned up the lane shift markings adequately. The car flashed a "lane departure" warning immediately followed by "BRAKE" and stood the car up on the front wheels for about one second.
I would guess the car detected the diagonal line across my lane and thought I was going to steer into the truck. It's probably a bug that it didn't give priority to the lane markings it was already following.
A lady from Honda called me a few days later to ask how I liked my new car. I talked to her about this and she told me I should contact the city to tell them to clean up the construction markings. I suppose she was trying to shift blame and liability off of Honda.
I will say that Hondas forward collision warning system never has a false negative. It saved me a fortune in insurance premiums by automatically breaking at the right time when I had to swerve out of the way of a oncoming car and almost rear ended a parked car. I hadn’t seen the parked car and would have put a real dent in it if it hadn’t stopped me.
I do hope they solve the phantom breaking issue, but I hope it doesn’t neuter the collision avoidance system.
How is this allowed to happen? Cars doing something they literally should be designed not to do as a core basic requirement. It is like the technology is regressive.
Not a lot of details. Why only accord and cr-v? My Clarity reliably slams on the brakes if I pass over a certain spot on CA-24 in Oakland with the ACS engaged. And the FCWS freaks out at low speeds frequently. Almost certainly the same hardware that’s on an accord.
I have a 2017 crv and do notice that it has some edge cases in the collision avoidance system. Usually this is when changing lanes along a curve and there is a wall it will sometimes active for a moment or in a curve and I'm a few feet back from a person in the other lane it seems to detect that has being in front and triggers the warning. Only once have I had it forcibly try and stop, and that was with good reason. Otherwise, I've been very satisfied with the crv in general.
My Merc also does this type of shenanigans... Like see's walls where's nothing and brakes on that side to call my attention but instead it just scares me to death and sometimes it does this on the highway!!!
Also, sometimes while turning the wheel going left, like getting into a different road it just beeps like I'm hitting a wall.
Had a 2015 Accord that I had to sell due to... Reasons and boy di I miss that car...
Yes I have one of the possibly affected vehicles and I concur the anti-collision system is too sensitive. I usually disable it when I drive. It's extremely annoying that there is no way to disable it permanently though (it gets re-enabled when the car is restarted)
It's a huge PITA that these systems work most of the time but have glitches occasionally which are completely unpredictable and distracting. That's unacceptable imo. I'd rather not have it at all
Every car I've owned, Honda, Toyota, Chevy, BMW, all have had false automatic braking events, not like every day but often enough. I always disable this feature if possible. Even when it beeps out of nowhere without braking, it /creates/ a dangerous situation.
I think it still makes sense for the average US driver, who is quite bad and not attentive even when not on the phone. For the rest of us, this is a misfeature.
I would love to see the breakdown by age. When it was Toyotas fictitious problem it came down to a bunch of old people. People that shouldn't even have a license
When it was Toyotas fictitious problem it came down to a bunch of old people.
Yeah, right. Blame it on "old people". Certainly not the code base with 10,000 global variables:
The design review found things like: Other egregious deviations from standard practice were the number of global variables in the system. (A variable is a location in memory that has a number in it. A global variable is any piece of software anywhere in the system can get to that number and read it or write it.) The academic standard is zero. Toyota had more than 10,000 global variables.
Anecdote: I had a '19 Accord. I'm not an old person and experienced this a good dozen times over the 18 months I owned it. I sold it primarily due to this issue.
I have a 2021 Honda and have had no problem with the auto braking, so I'm going to assume that either the cars affected have a specific defect from the factory or something specific has broken.
To all appearances, the way it is set up on my car is designed to prevent phantom braking and does so.
The big orange warning flashes occasionally when there is a large speed difference compared to the car ahead. This can happen on an off ramp, or when a car ahead is turning right.
In these cases, it's never braked on its own, and it seems likely that it would only brake to mitigate a collision rather than avoiding one. This, to me, is a reasonable tradeoff that surely is by design.
When using the adaptive cruise control, it once or twice (in well over a year) has reacted to a car in the wrong lane, for instance, on a three lane highway it detected the vehicle in the left lane momentarily and slowed slightly. But it didn't panic brake, and it's very rare that it has an issue with lanes, even on sweeping curves.
The only time it has actually panic braked was when someone ahead of me slowed to turn right, and I was startled and hit the brake and it assisted so as to brake much harder. It seems like it was activated only when I hit the brakes and only because of the velocity/abruptness of the pedal movement, which is exactly what it's intended to do (may be classified separately as brake assist). I didn't need to brake that hard, but I wasn't rear ended so...
The final glitch I've had is that when driving in heavy snow/sleet/rain the radar stops working when gunk covers the sensor. This has only happened once and when it happened, it only shut off the adaptive cruise control without doing anything else undesirable. It's not clear to me if there is some reason there isn't a smooth cover to prevent accumulation.
Sometimes incredibly weird electrical glitches can arise from somewhere that the average service place will not find or even really look for. I had a different car (not a Honda) that was about 6 years old, no visible rust, and seemed afflicted by electrical gremlins. It turned out that due to poor design of the taillights, water had collected in them, and the exposed wiring had corroded to where it looked like it had been at the bottom of the ocean. I only found out because one taillight finally stopped working at all. But it was a lesson on how simple damage to wiring can be hard to diagnose, because inconsistent voltage or whatever scrambles the computers. In theory, that car had a built in diagnostic function to warn a taillight was out. But it never registered at all.
I expect a Japanese car to not have problems like this until 200,000 miles in the rust belt. But everybody tends to rest on their laurels.
The 04 R1 I used to ride had a goofy double throttle system where the cable directly drove the first set of intake butterflies, but a duplicate set downstream was computer controlled via servo. This was the generation that introduced catalytic converters to bikes, and I presumed the intention was to limit throttle opening rates via computer overriding what the rider had done when opened too quickly. Conventionally that transient pressure drop situation is handled by throwing a bunch of excess fuel into the air stream to not hesitate and stumble from most the fuel falling out of suspension and clinging to the walls, i.e. they were cleaning up emissions.
Even this seemingly benign and dead-stupid bit of a computer override almost caused me to crash on multiple occasions. If the rider opened the throttle aggressively far beyond where the servo operated throttle was at, and immediately began dialing it back to reduce the acceleration, the servo operated throttle would continue opening to meet the still more open cable operated throttle's position. So rider is telling bike to accelerate less, and bike is accelerating more in a game of computer catch up. This is not only very unexpected on a naturally aspirated ICE, but outright dangerous on a nearly 200HP sportbike.
At least it was relatively trivial to remove the plates from the servo actuated throttle shaft and let the computer keep pointlessly twisting a bare shaft.