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Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

wsj.com

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Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#171

Post by ghaff »

dwiel wrote: post #99
vonmoltke wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to reply to all three of you (turtlebits, maxerickson, teod) with basically the same points. I'll put it here because yours is currently the top-ranked reply, but I am going to address all three of you. > Once cars are autonomous, it makes it drastically simpler to carpool/rideshare or even pick up and drop off riders that may share the same or partial route as you. I don't see how it is drastically simpler. Y…

from another post above a trip from SF to Vegas is 569 miles and 8 hours. The standard reimbursement (gas + wear and tear) is $0.50/mile. So that is $260 in gas + wear and tear. a quick search finds taxi drivers are $13/hr - $20/hr. that is an additional $104 - $160. The slower your drive, the higher a percentage the taxi driver will account for. Another site mentions that 2/3 of the taxi fare is going towards gas +…

>self-driving cars could lower costs by 30% - 60% just from labor savings.

Which is almost certainly not enough to drive the radical changes in car ownership behavior that many people seem to assume will happen. To be sure with a human driver you probably need to also account for utilization rates and returning to their starting point.

I've never been quite able to square the rates of things like Zipcar with taxi/Uber. Given cabbie salaries, it seems they should be closer--at least in places that don't have medallion systems that really skew things.

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#172

Post by ghaff »

pnut wrote: post #129

The impending dawn of the autonomous car era is the reason why I am not marching on Washington for rail investment. This is really one time where cynical cheapskate politics may hasten rapid, positive societal change.

Or, alternatively, where hesitating to make enormous infrastructure investments for questionable return ended up to be the sensible approach after all.

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#173

Post by MBCook »

ben1040 wrote: post #170
MBCook wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still works well for long drives or when traffic is quite light. I'm glad I have it. Just not the panacea I was hoping for. I REALLY wanted the automatic breaking, and I'm glad I have that.

yeah, the automatic braking is worth it. Yesterday someone abruptly cut me off; the car hit the brakes to avoid a collision more quickly than I would have reacted myself.

I've only had it go off once when someone did something stupid (don't remember what). I was paying attention and slammed the brake on as fast as I could.

Didn't matter. I could feel how easy it was to push the brake in. The car had started to brake a few milliseconds before I could.

I would have been fine in that case since I was already paying full attention, but I was glad to know it was working. I live in an area with occasional deer on the highway and I've had VERY close run-ins before.

I'm very glad to have the feature.

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#174

Post by usrusr »

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.

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)

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#175

Post by icebraining »

jklowden wrote: post #135
randyrand wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seat belts were invented by English engineer George Cayley in the mid-19th century,[3] though Edward J. Claghorn of New York, was granted the first patent. The government did not invent the seatbelt. All it did was monopolize it through the patent system and later criminalize not wearing it. How heroic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt

I didn't mean to suggest the government invented seat belts. It did mandate them, not only wearing them, but circa 1964 their very availability in cars. The industry, and a fair number of car buyers, didn't want buyers to be reminded that cars could be dangerous. Heroic? No, but what government is heroic? That seat belts and seat belt laws save lives every year is indisputable. Perhaps to you that's an impermissible…

I didn't mean to suggest the government invented seat belts. It did mandate them, not only wearing them, but circa 1964 their very availability in cars. The industry, and a fair number of car buyers, didn't want buyers to be reminded that cars could be dangerous.

I don't think that's true. Nash had made them standard years before, multiple other manufacturers had them as options, and Ford promoted cars with their Lifeguard system[1], including sealtbelts, long before those laws.

The reality is that people didn't care, as evidenced by the fact that in 1981, thirteen years after seatbelts became mandatory in all cars, the CDC estimated that only 11% of car occupants used them[2].

[1] https://books.google.pt/books?id=1FQEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA47&lpg=PA...

[2] http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/seatbeltbrief/

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#176

Post by massysett »

libraryatnight wrote: post #137
ben1040 wrote: post #27

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. Calling it "self-driving" is kind of a misnomer and I think the article kind of blows it out of proportion. It will track the car in front of you…

I just bought the 2016 Civic Touring last week and it came with this. It certainly seems to be getting ahead of things to say it's self-driving. Your description is accurate, it's more of a helper than truly autonomous. I will say I was concerned, because there was a Car and Driver review where they seemed to indicate it had issues thinking you were drifting and trying to correct when you were fine, but I haven't had…

I have the 2016 Accord with Sensing and occasionally the road departure mitigation system will freak out and warn you even where there is no drifting at all. At one point on my drive the pavement goes from asphalt to concrete and the lane markings lighten, and this fools it nearly every time.

Overall, the whole system was worth it for the forward collision mitigation system alone. It can be a bit of a nanny but it can save me from rear-ending someone.

I find the lane keeping assist system to be of dubious utility. It can't completely drive the car--it doesn't like relatively mild curves on the freeway--so if it can't completely drive the car what good is it? The adaptive cruise control is nice for those situations when highway-speed cruise control is actually useful--which is to say, it's not too useful in a congested city. What would be more useful is if the thing could automatically follow the car in front of me in a traffic jam.

I hope the government requires these forward-collision mitigation systems as standard equipment in a few years. They are that useful. The rest of it? Meh.

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#177

Post by devy »

ben1040 wrote: post #27

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. Calling it "self-driving" is kind of a misnomer and I think the article kind of blows it out of proportion. It will track the car in front of you…

What this WSJ article described definitely seems more like a Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC)[1] than true autonomous driving [2].

Note that ACC has been around for LONG time - as early as 1992. And the new Honda Civic's tech package's ACC + Lane keeping is only considered to be Level 2 Autonomous driving, whereas Tesla has achieved Level 3 autonomy [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cruise_control_syst...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#178

Post by libraryatnight »

massysett wrote: post #176
libraryatnight wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just bought the 2016 Civic Touring last week and it came with this. It certainly seems to be getting ahead of things to say it's self-driving. Your description is accurate, it's more of a helper than truly autonomous. I will say I was concerned, because there was a Car and Driver review where they seemed to indicate it had issues thinking you were drifting and trying to correct when you were fine, but I haven't had…

I have the 2016 Accord with Sensing and occasionally the road departure mitigation system will freak out and warn you even where there is no drifting at all. At one point on my drive the pavement goes from asphalt to concrete and the lane markings lighten, and this fools it nearly every time. Overall, the whole system was worth it for the forward collision mitigation system alone. It can be a bit of a nanny but it ca…

I'll have to test it out on a different bit of highway, perhaps one of our older more weathered areas where lines are less defined to see how it really holds up.

I'm fortunate in that I usually only drive off peak hours, so cruise control is usually an option. I typically only use it on long drives, but my wife is a cruise control junkie and she loves the features on the new Honda.

I'd agree, the most useful bit seems to be the collision mitigation, but I still find the other stuff cool :) Oh, and the lane change camera is pretty awesome (though not relevant to our self-driving topic).

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#179

Post by vvanders »

mikeash wrote: post #134
MBCook wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got the same car and you're dead on. I really wanted the automatic cruise control but the truth is it's a hassle in the city on the highway. I don't want to constantly adjust the distance between the car in front of me and my car as conditions change so I end up just managing it myself without cruise control or setting it 'classic' mode where it doesn't use the radar. That said shortly after I bought the car I d…

That's sad that it doesn't handle heavy traffic well. That should be where it does best . Tesla's system, for example, is nice on the open road but absolutely wonderful in heavy traffic. Too bad about not handling full stops, too. I wonder if that's a technical limitation, or if it's just something they didn't want to allow.

Oh man, all this.

I thought Autopilot was nifty but it wasn't until I slogged through ~40 minutes of rush hour without touching the pedals or wheel when I realized how awesome it really was.

It's useful at-speed but the killer app really is rush hour traffic.

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#180

Post by stcredzero »

Yhippa wrote: post #51
nostromo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could get in my car, read a bit and fall asleep, and wake up in Las Vegas from San Francisco, I'd prefer it over flying every time. But this has more to do with how air travel has become miserable than anything else.

This could create a whole new class of car as well. Would be cool to see a more modern VW Westfalia.

Yup. I immediately thought of a VW microbus-like, with people sitting around a table in back playing boardgames.
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