[sigmabody]

Originally Posted by tscharf

You are passing bikers in your lane by crossing the centerline and the lane assistance with steering intervention "feature" jerks your car back towards the bikers. I have had this happen several times. Yes, I could have signaled to avoid this but that is not my normal behavior in that situation.

Yup; I remember something like this happening to me also (before I turned off this half-baked software system). It's just not smart enough with the corner cases to give confidence in using it.

To be fair, it's perfectly fine roughly 99% of the time or more, I would say. As long as you an tolerate a terrifying, unexpected, and potentially life-threatening false-positive intervention every month or so, where the vehicle will try to kill you and/or someone else, and you are sure you will be gripping the steering wheel with enough force to react and overcome it whenever it randomly occurs, then this system is fine to use as-is.

[Marty in NY]

Originally Posted by sigmabody

Yup; I remember something like this happening to me also (before I turned off this half-baked software system). It's just not smart enough with the corner cases to give confidence in using it.

To be fair, it's perfectly fine roughly 99% of the time or more, I would say. As long as you an tolerate a terrifying, unexpected, and potentially life-threatening false-positive intervention every month or so, where the vehicle will try to kill you and/or someone else, and you are sure you will be gripping the steering wheel with enough force to react and overcome it whenever it randomly occurs, then this system is fine to use as-is.

Thing is, the car is designed and programmed as it is. The only real variable are the owners. We each want it to work the way we want it or think it should and complain when it doesn't or turn off features that help us 80% of the time.
When I first got behind the wheel of mine, I cautiously went about testing the driver assist features to see how they worked, I read the manual but you have to do it yourself and experiment. I already had some experience with my wife's car which has lane assist features but they were quite limited compared to the X5.
Now that I've driven it a couple of years and have seen all sorts of good and bad road markings, I pretty much know its limitations and sometimes odd behavior and have found it very easy to manually overcome its limitations. I now "understand" the car and find it quite good at the far majority of road hazards one normally encounters.
The way I see it is it's one step closer to the world where we have fully autonomous vehicles and we literally sit in the back reading our tablets. Not saying I would like that world but I can see it coming. When it does, these autonomous cars will be programmed to follow road rules, they won't have the ability to ignore them as we humans choose to do at times. So the X5 is partially on its way there and if we allow it to do as its programmed, and make the slight corrections when needed, it is helping to create a safer mode of transportation which is better for all who share the road.

[ScaldedDog]

I may have posted this before:

Personal transportation is at the Vanguard of freedom. Cars aren't just practical tools, but manifestations of liberty. Driving isn't a chore crying out to be automated. It is the greatest spiritual innovation of the last 200 years. - John Pearley Huffman, in Car and Driver

I sure am glad I had lane change, or MCAS, or whatever they call it turned off when the hot shot trailer tire exploded in front of me this week. I had enough going on without having to wrestle the car.

Mark

[Marty in NY]

Something similar happened to me on my way down to Florida recently on I75. There was debris from a semi tire in the lane next to mine, I was using DAP and had my hand on the wheel like you're supposed to. A small truck ahead of me in the right lane hit the shredded tire part and it flew into my lane in front of me. I simply turned my wheel and avoided it. Using DAP doesn't mean you can sleep at the wheel, it's only an assist. Turning the wheel while on DAP is easy.

It's very easy to manually overcome any of the driver assist features. Plus you get to select how aggressive you want some of them in the first place. I don't understand why people cannot figure out how to use them and simply turn them off. I use it all the time and have come across many unpredictable situations on the road, DAP has never gotten in the way or caused issues for me. I do turn it off when in messed up construction zones where they attempt to paint new temporary lines but don't adequately cover up the old ones. To me this is just using common sense.
I think if people learned how to use the DAP features and not try to interject their bad driving habits, they could get along with it just fine.

[ScaldedDog]

Originally Posted by Marty in NY

I think if people learned how to use the DAP features and not try to interject their bad driving habits, they could get along with it just fine.

LOL!

[tscharf]

Without DAP you are required to go through a bunch of menus to turn lane keeping / steering intervention on and off.

I find the front end collision avoidance to work reliably. There is no babysitting and trying to read the mind of driver assistance features required. Because the problems tend to show up in already challenging driving situations it can make things more stressful. If I get a tug on my steering wheel my first thought is "it is making a mistake again". The impulse is to always fight it. It grabs your attention and that might be useful sometimes, but not so far for me.

Too bad you can't automate a recording for faulty driving intervention so BMW might be able to improve results.

If a safety feature is avoiding danger much more often than it is potentially inserting danger then it will be useful and more importantly trustworthy. We had "stay in lane" warnings beeping for 15 seconds straight on a straight highway a couple times on the last trip for no known reason, driver assistance was just lost. Working 99% of the time is not good enough when the driver works 99.9% of the time. A 10X false positive rate is not usable, a 0.1X is very usable.

Generalized driving assistance is magnitudes harder in software than avoiding rear end collisions and it shows. My guess is DAP equipped cars perform better.

[sigmabody]

Originally Posted by tscharf

If a safety feature is avoiding danger much more often than it is potentially inserting danger then it will be useful and more importantly trustworthy. We had "stay in lane" warnings beeping for 15 seconds straight on a straight highway a couple times on the last trip for no known reason, driver assistance was just lost. Working 99% of the time is not good enough when the driver works 99.9% of the time. A 10X false positive rate is not usable, a 0.1X is very usable.

This is the crux of my position and feelings on automated "safety" systems also. A system is valuable to me if it net reduces the amount of dangerous incidents when operating the vehicle. The quality of the system to achieve this is based in large part on how safely the person can/does operate the vehicle without such a system. For example, if you regularly find yourself dozing off when driving and having muscle spasms which jerk the vehicle randomly out of your lane (and potentially toward a collision with another vehicle or barrier), at a rate of more than 1x/month, then BMW's lane assistance software is probably a net benefit for you (in that the incidence rate of this for BMW's software is less than this, so you're better of allowing it to keep the vehicle in the lane by default and not you). Conversely, if you would do this less than once every six months or so, then BMW's software is a net negative for your operation of the vehicle.

The better of a driver you are in general, the higher the quality the assistance needs to be to be net positive. For me, I find the software to be a significant net negative in overall safety and dangerous incidents. I freely admit that for others on this forum and in the real world, that experience and result may be inverted, and for people for whom it is, I would probably recommend using the system.

Notably, this is also a large part of why people might have vastly different perspectives about how "good" BMW's systems are. For people who are otherwise good drivers, the systems may seem very bad (based on increases of dangerous incidence rates). For people who are otherwise bad drivers, the systems may seem good (or even very good, if one is a very bad driver normally). It's all subjective, based on how one operates a vehicle without such systems.

[Marty in NY]

Originally Posted by sigmabody

The better of a driver you are in general, the higher the quality the assistance needs to be to be net positive.

Yeah, I agree with that statement. Basically anything you buy should improve your life, else why do we buy it? On behalf of any drivers assist in any make car, it is what it is, the variables are all the drivers who own them. We can't change how they work (except for minor adjustments) so we humans need to adapt to them or as some say, turn them off entirely but I prefer to find the good in them and learn how to use them to my advantage.

I consider myself a good driver and can certainly get where I'm going without any assist features.. .. but, using DAP over long drives has completely and repeatedly prevented arm and shoulder fatigue pain and has never caused an unsafe situation for me. I have fine tuned its assertions to my liking and it's very easy to manually overcome them. Do I completely trust them? Hell no, my hand is alway on the wheel somewhere

[tooloud10]

Originally Posted by Marty in NY

Something similar happened to me on my way down to Florida recently on I75. There was debris from a semi tire in the lane next to mine, I was using DAP and had my hand on the wheel like you're supposed to. A small truck ahead of me in the right lane hit the shredded tire part and it flew into my lane in front of me. I simply turned my wheel and avoided it. Using DAP doesn't mean you can sleep at the wheel, it's only an assist. Turning the wheel while on DAP is easy.

It's very easy to manually overcome any of the driver assist features. Plus you get to select how aggressive you want some of them in the first place. I don't understand why people cannot figure out how to use them and simply turn them off. I use it all the time and have come across many unpredictable situations on the road, DAP has never gotten in the way or caused issues for me. I do turn it off when in messed up construction zones where they attempt to paint new temporary lines but don't adequately cover up the old ones. To me this is just using common sense.
I think if people learned how to use the DAP features and not try to interject their bad driving habits, they could get along with it just fine.

Couldn't agree more. DAP isn't Level 5 autonomy, nor should anyone expect it to be. It is pretty damn good at keeping me centered on the highway on windy days, and things like that. Sometimes it makes a mistake but it's not "life threatening" level because I'm still paying attention and I correct it.

The value for me isn't that I can pay less attention to driving, it's that you can relax a bit and not have to constantly provide steering input the entire time. I just keep a hand on the wheel and if it tugs a bit I already know exactly what's going on and correct if necessary.

It's always in the back of my head how the system is likely reading the road--if I see one of those odd entrance ramps that were mentioned, I'm ready for it. If it's raining or snowing, I know the system won't work as well. If I see the highway markings are missing, I already know it's going to have trouble.

If any of us had seen this technology in the 80s we'd have been astounded but instead a lot of people dismiss it for not being completely perfect right out of the box.

[Marty in NY]

Originally Posted by tooloud10

Couldn't agree more. DAP isn't Level 5 autonomy, nor should anyone expect it to be. It is pretty damn good at keeping me centered on the highway on windy days, and things like that. Sometimes it makes a mistake but it's not "life threatening" level because I'm still paying attention and I correct it.

The value for me isn't that I can pay less attention to driving, it's that you can relax a bit and not have to constantly provide steering input the entire time. I just keep a hand on the wheel and if it tugs a bit I already know exactly what's going on and correct if necessary.

It's always in the back of my head how the system is likely reading the road--if I see one of those odd entrance ramps that were mentioned, I'm ready for it. If it's raining or snowing, I know the system won't work as well. If I see the highway markings are missing, I already know it's going to have trouble.

If any of us had seen this technology in the 80s we'd have been astounded but instead a lot of people dismiss it for not being completely perfect right out of the box.

Good summary - on target