So... collision avoidance?

[Wade Lippman]

I posted this same question 5 months ago, but will be buying a new car next week and still can't make my mind up.

I am getting a Mazda CX3; I chose that because I really need the blind spot monitoring.
I don't need collision avoidance or lane departure warning, but since I will be driving this car for the foreseeable future, I want to get it right.

They would cost me $5,000 more. (yes, that $5,000 also gets me a sun roof, navigation, pandora etc. etc; but none of it has any value to me.)
The salesman I spoke to says that collision avoidance is only useful on cruise control (which I don't use) and lane departure warning are generally annoying.
He recommended I save my money.

That was your general consensus 5 months ago, but I just can't make up my mine.

Any strong opinions? (yes, I do own a sawstop; why do you ask?)

[Erik Loza]

My mother in law has it in her Lexus and when I drive that car, I find it distracting. She is elderly, however, and swears by it.

This is just my opinion: Modern cars are generally mechanically sound and if there are going to be problems, it will be with the electronics and usually, such electronics are non-serviceable. In other words, you can't fix it. You replace it and generally, such component modules have no aftermarket alternative, so you are locked into buying from the dealership at dealership prices. When we bought our Mini Cooper, the dealer tried to talk me into all these electronics like backup camera, integrated iphone with the car's head unit, etc. I'm not opposed to those technologies but would want the option to be able to repair them myself or have aftermarket options that did not require me being on hook with the dsealership. And lo and behold, if I go on the Mini forums, what are owners having problems with? The electronics. And a trip to the dealership. Even if it's under warranty, it's still a trip to the dealership. And you know what happens once it goes out of warranty. Anyhow, my personal preference is to keep cars as analog as possible but that may be hard to do these days. Good luck, whatever you decide to do.

Erik

[Todd Mason-Darnell]

We have the blind stop warning and back up camera/warning on our Altima.

My wife loves it.

It was annoying for me at first, but then once I got used to it, I loved it.

When I drive my car, I miss it.

[Mike Henderson]

For $5K, I'd probably pass. What I want in a car electronics is the ability to connect my iPhone to the display so that I can use my iPhone navigation - that is, show on the car screen exactly what I see on my iPhone. My iPhone navigation is always up to date and I already know how to use it.

Mike

[Tim Bridge]

Someone is going to get into an accident and sue the car companies because the car didn't prevent it.
All of these gadgets are a replacement for good driving.
Maybe these things are being added because of all of the texting by drivers.

I see a problem with the automatic braking on the new cars. On a tv commercial there is a car that gets cut off and it stops when the car stops in front of it. I can see this feature being used be some evil people.

[Stan Calow]

I have a dash cam that includes a "too close" alert signal, but of course, it doesn't brake for you.

[Frederick Skelly]

I wouldnt pay $5000 to get that, if you find no value in the other things you get with it.

[Brian W Smith]

My MIL is past driving,so I have been taking her '95 Buick Park Ave when going out of town to archery tourneys.This car exudes, "old driver" at the wheel.

Hit the cruise,and weave just a touch whilst flying up the highways see's other drivers not getting any where close...funny actually.

My last trip;had to take my sons push mower back so,had the handle hanging out of the trunk.Had the rd to myself?There's more than one way to skin a cat?Old Buick's are cheap.

[Matt Day]

For $5K, I'd probably pass. What I want in a car electronics is the ability to connect my iPhone to the display so that I can use my iPhone navigation - that is, show on the car screen exactly what I see on my iPhone. My iPhone navigation is always up to date and I already know how to use it.

Mike

Agreed. That's about the extent of the infotainment I would want in a new car. I don't see a point to much of the other stuff if you're paying attention like you should be while driving. And a good Bluetooth system of course.

[Barry McFadden]

Personally...I think that if you need the car to tell you that you are driving too close or going out of your lane you should be taking the bus....

[Jim Becker]

I have collision avoidance (and adaptive cruise) on my Grand Cherokee Summit and when we recently purchased Professor Dr. SWMBO's new Outback Limited I made sure it was equipped with the Eyesight system. I'm a believer...the combination of collision warning/avoidance, blind spot detection and AAC have saved my bacon a bunch of times over the past few years. I wouldn't buy a vehicle without it at this point if given the choice.

[Wayne Lovell]

The 2 things I really like on my Expedition that I thought I would never use are the rear view camera and the beeper that goes off when you get within about 2 feet from something in front of you. The rear view camera really gives you a wide angle view, better than you get from looking to one side or the other. The beeper that warns you when you are getting close is great my depth perception is not as good as it was 50 years ago and without it I would often find that when parking I would think I was as close to an object in front of me only to find out that I was still 4 to 5 feet away from it. (this is only a problem from a distance of about 5 to 10 feet. The Doctor says this is common after cataract surgery.)

[Pat Barry]

How bad a driver are you? How continually attentive are you to every situation on the road? How bad a driver is likely to be driving this car, ie: wife, daughter, son, etc? How continually attentive are they? Depending on your answer you will see the need for something like this.

[Tim Bridge]

I have the backup sensors on my pickup truck and love them. A camera would be handy too but costly. The adaptive cruise control is also a good item.
All of the othe new gadgets just perpetuate inattentive bad driving.

[Wade Lippman]

How bad a driver are you? How continually attentive are you to every situation on the road? How bad a driver is likely to be driving this car, ie: wife, daughter, son, etc? How continually attentive are they? Depending on your answer you will see the need for something like this.

In 40 years of car ownership I have never hit another car or driven off the road. (I've been rear ended 5 times, but nothing will prevent that)
My wife has a nasty tailgating habit, but has never hit anything except a deer and a dog; the system won't prevent those.

But I can envision looking at the GPS while the guy in front of me slams his brakes on. It has never happened; but wouldn't I feel silly if it did!

[Malcolm McLeod]

It's mostly a matter of personal driving habits ... Would you use it? How long do you plan to keep your car? How much do you drive (:: cost per mile)?

At the moment, adaptive cruise is my pet peeve. There will be a queue of cars 2-miles long in the left lane, all driving as fast as the slow idiot at the front hogging the 'passing' lane. Cruise has 'adapted', so everyone is happy! Que sera.

With all the new sensors, what you are seeing is the opening sprint in the race to perfect the self-driving vehicle. They are the eyes and ears of the CPU that will eventually manage it all. I'll probably never 'fly' in George Jetson's volantor, but I'll bet in 10 years my car drives me to/fm work while I read the paper (on the HUD).

[Mike Null]

I have blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, and collision avoidance. I don't use the cruise control but BSM is very good and helpful and collision avoidance is handy--mostly when parking. Mine does have auto braking but only at slower speeds.

I'm 79 and admit that I'm not nearly as good a driver as I once was so these gadgets have more value for me than for younger drivers. Blue tooth is a must and I use my phone for GPS but it doesn't flash on the screen.

[Chris Padilla]

BMW also offers such things on their cars. I politely pass on them...too expensive and I'd likely turn them off due to annoyance. I have the same issues with automatic lighting and especially automatic brights/high beams. They never seem to go on or turn off when I would like them too so I prefer doing it myself. Now rain-sensing wipers that adjust by reading the amount of rain falling and taking one's speed into account are very very nice! BMW's work really well.

Having a back-up camera, side cameras, and proximity sensors are all very nice and work well (on my BMWs) so I like those.

Google already has automatic vehicles puttering around our streets snapping pics galore!!

[Jerome Stanek]

I've been driving for over 55 years and only had 2 times where I hit someone from behind. One time a brake line broke and the other someone pushed me into the car in front on an icy interstate. Cop almost hit me that time also slid past me.

[Malcolm McLeod]

Google already has automatic vehicles...

...and just have to prove it safe, reliable, legislatively acceptable, insurable, affordable, and finally - - mass marketable! Then it can drive us to work. Yeehaw!

[Steve Peterson]

My wife has collision avoidance on her car and it is quite alarming when it goes off. It is enough to make you jump and possibly steel into a different lane before you realize what the alarm is for. The threshold is set way too far away. Someone can cut in front of you and set it off even though they are accelerating away.

All of the other safety features (lane sensors on the mirrors, backup camera, etc.) are great. I would skip the collision avoidance.

Steve

[Wade Lippman]

My wife has collision avoidance on her car and it is quite alarming when it goes off. It is enough to make you jump and possibly steel into a different lane before you realize what the alarm is for. The threshold is set way too far away. Someone can cut in front of you and set it off even though they are accelerating away.

All of the other safety features (lane sensors on the mirrors, backup camera, etc.) are great. I would skip the collision avoidance.

Steve

Thank you so much. I knew it was unnecessary, but someone saying it is a hazard sends it home.

[Terry Hatfield]

My wife still has a car with all that stuff. She still likes it. So do I. It does take some getting used to. Occasionally I hear the collision warning go off when she calls me. Hands free of course. She never misses a beat with the conversation. I certainly would not call it a "hazard" in her case. Her driving...now that is a hazard. And if I need her to know that I said that I will tell her myself. :D

[Greg Peterson]

I recently heard that automobile manufacturers have voluntarily agreed to make collision avoidance standard equipment, starting in the next two or three years.
If we are going to have autonomous cars we'll have to start somewhere.

[Myk Rian]

Stick a couple blind spot mirrors on your outside mirrors.
Google it.

[Tim Bridge]

Have any of you driven the cars that self parallel park?

[Greg Peterson]

Stick a couple blind spot mirrors on your outside mirrors.
Google it.

I dislike those fidheye mirrors as they take away surface area from the regular mirror. If your mirrors are adjusted correctly, those fisheye mirrors are not useful.
Regardless, they don't address forward looking avoidance technology.

[Jim Becker]

The electronic blind spot detectors on my vehicle have more than paid for themselves. I drive a lot to business meetings to/from the DC area on the Interstate. I cannot even count how many times some idiot crossed multiple lanes at high speed just as I was about to move to another lane and that extra warning was the difference between being safe and potentially being in a horrible accident. I only have two eyes and even if I cross them a little, I can't be looking "everywhere" at the same time. ;) The add-on mirrors don't cut it in that respect as they only help (minimally) if you can actually look at them.

[Wade Lippman]

Ordered the car today; no collision avoidance. BSM though, as I really need that. In fact, I got a Mazda as it was the only tiny SUV that came with it.

[Roger Feeley]

FYI,
Connecting your iPhone to the car so you can use the iPhone screen and apps is called CarPlay
The same thing is available for other phones and is called MirrorLink.

[Roger Feeley]

I would love Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) but I'm a little concerned about how we are reducing the amount of driving responsibility without eliminating it as we move towards fully autonomous cars. As the drive gets less and less to do, he could become less vigilant. Until we have fully autonomous cars, the driver must still react to emergencies.

If I do get ACC, I'm hoping to delay a purchase until ACC gets Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communications. Right now, ACC is just your vehicle reading it's surroundings. The next generation will still do that but it will also communicate with the car ahead of you. If the guy ahead barely taps his brakes, your car will act more like a shock absorber than an amplifier.

Currently, in a brake tap situation in heavy traffic, Car A taps brakes. Car B sees that and taps a little harder. Car C taps a little harder and so on until you have a full traffic jam for absolutely no good reason.

With ACC+V2V, Car A taps the brakes. Car B gets updates about just how much the brake pedal was depressed and for how long. It factors that against Car A's relative distance and takes the minimum action to remain safe. Car C probably won't even know what happened. No traffic jam.

This is done with Bluetooth using something called Angle of Arrival (AoA) where Car B can tell that a BT connection came from the car ahead based on the direction of the signal.

If I were buying a car today, I would definitely pay for the OEM backup camera. I have an aftermarket one on my XTerra (lousy visibility) and it doesn't include lines showing distance or the lines showing your backup path. I think you have to go with the OEM camera for that stuff.

Ditto on wanting CarPlay or MirrorLink (mirror my smartphone to the car screen). Check the HandsFree compatibility with your phone. There are big differences in how various car HandsFree kits work with various phones.

At the very least,
-- make and receive a phone call using the phonebook in your phone
-- send and receive a text
-- I would also test the kit to see how it works with two phones paired up.
-- With two phones paired and connected, play some audio from one phone and they try to initiate audio from the other
-- With two phones paired and connected, start a phone call and then receive a call from another phone and see how it interrupts.

And so on. You would need a total of 3 phones. Two paired and connected and one not paired.

You might also see what happens when you are talking on the phone and then walk into Bluetooth range with the car running. Do you lose the signal because the car took over your audio?

[Chris Padilla]

Interesting food for thought, Roger. Thanks for posting all that. My company is heavily involved with IOT (internet of things) and this squarely fits in and is not something I had thought about. Very cool.

[Roger Feeley]

Interesting food for thought, Roger. Thanks for posting all that. My company is heavily involved with IOT (internet of things) and this squarely fits in and is not something I had thought about. Very cool.

I think it's fair to say that my company is also squarely in the middle of IOT. I work for Frontline Test Equipment (recently acquired by Teledyne Lacroy). We are a leading provider of protocol analyzers and have been deep into Bluetooth since it was first invented.

I write the decoders for Frontline which is to say that I'm the guy that takes the packets apart and makes them look pretty. I work with Bluetooth, USB, Serial, NFC, Ethernet, 802.11, SDIO and a host of industrial protocols. My work is mostly Bluetooth but we go where the market seems to be heading. It a bit of a trick figuring out where the market is going and then staying ahead of it.

It's fun work and it pays well but there's not too much call for sniffing stuff around the house.

When I get my new shop, I would guess that there's a CNC router with my name on it somewhere. It will be interesting to sniff the usb link. Maybe I will write a plug-in for our software that shows the tool path.

We have a new grandson and my daughter got something called the Owlet which is a PulseOximiter in a sock that communicates via Bluetooth LE to a base station that passes the data along on wi-fi. Naturally, I sniffed the LE part and found a bug for them in their advertising.

[Mike Null]

Roger

My Volvo works well with my iPhone via Bluetooth. I can see my contact list, incoming calls etc. on my car screen and I can make calls from the car screen but can't see my Google iPhone GPS on the screen. Is there a way to do this or is that a whole new system?

[Jim Becker]

Roger

My Volvo works well with my iPhone via Bluetooth. I can see my contact list, incoming calls etc. on my car screen and I can make calls from the car screen but can't see my Google iPhone GPS on the screen. Is there a way to do this or is that a whole new system?

Apple CarPlay unfortunately doesn't work with all applications...

[paul cottingham]

My wife in the passenger seat and my daughter in the backseat. They don't miss anything, even stuff that poses no danger to us whatsoever.

[Dennis Peacock]

My wife in the passenger seat and my daughter in the backseat. They don't miss anything, even stuff that poses no danger to us whatsoever.

Oh....I can relate to this.!!! :D :D :D

[Roger Feeley]

There are Bluetooth profiles for the thing you describe as working. For instance, to see your phone book, the devices go through service discovery using SDP or Servise Discovery Profile. Then they open a channel over L2CAP. After some more fooling around, they open an Object Exchange session. The data they exchange is called PBAP or Phone Book Access Profile. Each of these steps has been carefully worked out.

The he is no BT profile for exchanging your gps data from the controlling organization. That's where CarPlay and mirror link come in and why they are such a good idea. Like the one ring, these things just duplicate your phone screen on your car. You can do nything on your car that you can do on your phone.

i don't know that much about these two systems. We don't sniff all the underlying protocols. But I like the idea.

so, to answer your question, it's a whole different thing.

[Chris Parks]

I love new technology on cars, my soon to be next car follows the car in front in a traffic jam with absolutely no input from the driver, stopping, starting & steering. Above a certain speed it then can self steer and has ACC which actually needs the driver to be aware of what is happening just as much as if he was controlling the speed himself. If the car is cruising at a set speed and comes up behind a slower car and the driver is not alert enough to pull out into another lane the car reduces speed which is the last thing you want. I think people hate this technology before they even get in a car and try it and can't understand why those same people will welcome new technology in phones etc. I welcome anything that makes driving easier, bring it on.

[Mike Null]

Roger
Thanks for the explanation.

[Al Launier]

Personally, because I can't see the rear of my car, I find it difficult to judge distance when backing up so my next car will have the rear camera feature & most likely only that (if it can be provide as only that without having to buy other options with it as a "package").
Having said that I suspect that after all these opinions that the OP is probably more confused than ever. Frankly, I think the OP has already answered his own quection. If he can get only the blind spot monitoring which he wants & needs, and he's not comfortable with the $5,000 cost for extras that he doesn't want, then he shouldn't buy/pay for what he doesn't want.

[Roger Feeley]

Chris, Which car is that? I have a friend with a Suburu that has ACC and he loves it. But self steering on the highway? Yikes!

I am a fan of a world without human drivers. I'm 62 and would love a self-driving car. As I get old and infirm (and, frankly, dangerous), I see it as a way to move about the city for much longer. But, I am concerned about the transition period where cars will start to take over bits and pieces of the driving tasks. As we drivers have less and less to do, my fear is that we will become bored and complacent. My guess is that things will get worse before they get much better.

That said, I really like your statement about, "above a certain speed". That strikes me as a very good compromise. If you are on I-70 driving across western Kansas, you are on auto-pilot. When you slow down going into Denver, you take over manual control. I would guess that, legally, you are still the driver of record and would be expected to remain at the wheel and vigilant. I think they are going through the same problems with airline pilots. The plane does so much of the flying now that it's hard for the pilot to remain alert.

Until we get fully autonomous vehicles, I'm sort of a fan of what I call 'discrete backup'. That's where the safety systems augment the driver but don't overtly replace the driver. I have a Sawstop and I would characterize that safety system as discrete. I know it's there but I am still the operator of the saw and practice good safety. If I fail, the safety system kicks in and bails me out.

[Chris Parks]

Roger, it is a Skoda Superb which is unavailable in the US but being a VW product is a close cousin to the Passat. It has what they call traffic jam assist for low speed control and ACC, lane assist and every other trick that VW has managed to cram into it for driving faster. I see there is a YT video of a driver asleep at the wheel of a Tesla which is driving itself, truly frightening and I think that the manufacturers may have to introduce something like the system on trains which requires input from the driver at pre-determined intervals. The Tesla company are leading the charge on this stuff and the rest of the world is madly trying to keep up. The Tesla will drop you at a destination and park itself with no input from anyone so I am told. I have seen a video again on YT of a Tesla self parking into a garage and closing the garage door! Awesome stuff.