> The only time I've gotten false positives on the collision avoidance was when I was going too fast for the situation.
I may have been going too fast for the collision avoidance system, but not for the situation: cars are parked on both sides, and frequently one or two cars will stick out a bit more than the others (by eg. 70cm) — I wasn't going faster than 30km/h (20mph) in dry, daylight conditions. If you avoid a pothole that turns your car into that parked car sticking out which is a bit ahead (at least 50m), it could signal a collision. At least that was my guess what was happening, I never felt at any risk whatsoever.
> I haven't experienced this personally, but a false positive here doesn't really have any downsides.
Oh, it does. When it happens, I worry if there's something I missed, so I spend another few seconds re-evaluating the situation around the car. As I didn't miss anything, cars do show up behind me in the lane I was entering into, and since my car is stopped only third of the way into the lane, most drivers coming up behind me start "overtaking" my protruding car, and I am in a much worse position. In city driving in traffic-heavy streets, one's got to use any time they've got available or impatient drivers around you start making even worse situations for themselves and you.
> This situation sounds like you may be driving faster than the flow of traffic, or the follow distance is not set far enough.
The situation I am describing is actually from a very low traffic situation on the highway, so there was no "flow of traffic". When a truck going 100km/h decides to overtake another truck going 95km/h on the highway, my car going at the speed limit of 130 km/h seems unable to see that from way ahead like a driver does, and it maintains the speed until way too late.
Contrary to that, if you are driving 130km/h and approach a car driving 125km/h, it starts slowing down probably at the same distance, which is now too soon.
Not to mention that my experience on European highways is that the when there's a lot of traffic, the "flow of traffic" speed is ~140km/h on roads with 130 limit (when I was driving 110-130km/h, I'd be constantly slowing down and speeding up, making for a much more exhausting drive — you can probably go down to 95 km/h to achieve a similar "flow" behind a slow-moving truck). Pilot Assist, however, only works up to exactly 139km/h even on really well-marked roads — this is perfectly fine if you ask me (the limit might be too high even), but we are talking about the state of assistive tech.
> You can also do the simple stay-at-this-speed cruise control, or adaptive cruise control without the automatic steering capabilities.
FWIW, the behaviour I was describing is part of the adaptive cruise system that seems to behave the same whether Pilot Assist is turned on or off.
But sure, you can still turn most of these off. I was just commenting on how bad the current implementation is in my car (2019 high-specced Volvo sedan), and that I can understand why someone might not want any of these today.