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

Honda's system cuts out at some 'slow' speed like 35mph. If you don't do anything the car should fully stop but that's because you'll trigger the automatic emergency breaking.

The problem with the system is it's relatively simplistic. You set a following distance (there are 4 options) and the car will never get closer to the car in front of you than you've specified. It will slow down as necessary to maintain that distance.

This works fine on empty highways but in traffic it doesn't help. Since it won't go to (and resume) from a full stop you have to fiddle with it constantly. In tight traffic the distance has to be modified or people will continually jump in front of you (causing the car to slow down and back off).

I'll also say that it waits a surprisingly long time to start braking to the point it can be a little unnerving at times. I know it knows there is a car there (there is a symbol on the dash to show that it sees a car) but it doesn't act until you get much closer.

A system like Tesla or Volvo have that can bring the car to a stop and then speed back up or could decide to try to maintain a distance similar to that other drivers are maintaining would be much nicer.

Still for long trips the Honda system is great. And you can always put it in 'dumb' cruise control mode if necessary.

I have the 2016 Honda Civic LX with Sensing. It doesn't require me to keep my hands on wheel. However, it keeps losing the lane, requiring you to steer manually. Maybe the lane markings are not clear enough here in Los Angeles.

Also, the adaptive cruise control often brakes abruptly, even making the front collision warning system go off. I also don't know if it activates the brake lights when it brakes (since traditional cruse controls don't). This means that I usually brake manually.

All those things make this feature less useful than it should be. Before I bought this car, I actually did some research on this, but I haven't found any test that compares how well these features do in practice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think it's about time or efficiency at all. I think it has to do with perceived fairness and our self-righteous culture. The faster-moving disappearing lane gets an inherent advantage, which could have been renounced by merging too early. People feel cheated. The problem is that, objectively, people merging all over the place creates more traffic than a uniform zipper merge so we all suffer.

In reality, the laws are very explicit (at least in GA where I live), and the person merging has priority. Anyone in an existing lane when a lane disappears is legally required to yield.

Additionally, everyone is entitled to this same advantage so it's really not unfair at all.

No thanks. Just something else to go wrong.