Recently we had a ‘situation’ on the road test desk. Nothing serious, just a logistical mess, but the eventual solution involved me blagging a lift up to MIRA from one of my What Car? colleagues.
George kindly bent his run from Brixton to the M1, passing through not just Finchley but also Archway, which is where I was waiting at the kerbside, crummy old road test backpack stuffed with the essentials: tape measure, gaffer tape, telemetry gear and very old, if-it-ain’t-broke laptop running VBox data-logging software.
The London-to-MIRA dash is one I do once or twice weekly. Three times if the proverbial hits the fan. Like a lot of this job, it’s a journey passed in solitude, so it was nice not only to be driven by somebody else but for it to be decent company, as George is.
He bought a Range Rover L322 in his early twenties so, in terms of raw tolerance for car-based financial turmoil, is up there with the best of us, only recently swapping the Rangie for a Mk5 Golf GTI (five doors, big teledial wheels, red: not my dream spec but still a lovely thing).
Playing passenger was enlightening. Free to observe, I could readily appreciate how much George was suffering at the hands of our car’s ADAS, which were running amok in London traffic.
No sooner had the lane keeping assistance made itself known than the road sign recognition would go off, then the driver attention monitor would extract its pound. I sat there thinking: this is what a dogfight sounds like when the entire squadron of enemy fighters achieve lock-on.
At this point I need to make it clear that George appeared to be doing nothing wrong. He seemed to be operating slickly in London traffic, which is, of course, as much art as science.
There’s give and take in the melee, but these systems don’t allow for that. They operate in a binary world where everything has a defined scope. At one point the driver monitoring went loco purely because poor George had had the temerity to glance out of the side window at an HGV speeding up to the dotted lines at a T-junction. Sensible to keep an eye on that sort of thing, no?
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The UX in April made my mind us to not look at anything from either brand again. Utterly infuriating, down right distracting and not even remotely relaxing to drive. Especially with the camera based system picking up speed limits on side roads. The inability to actually turn off the lane keep assist made it downright dangerous when trying to manoeuvre around our estate as it kept cutting in and steering me towards parked cars and traffic islands. Get them in the sea.
It will be interesting to see how Toyota and the Japanese update their software to make it easier to turn off. Culturally they haven't been great at updates as that would mean the team that released it got it wrong and try to save face! (Which is strange as in hardware, kaizen is core to their improvements)
New Volvo owner here. The auto brake has helped save me once when a car just pulled out and the system helped increase the effectiveness of my braking and steering to avoid it. On the other hand it has randomly braked, not too hard, going past parked cars. However on most cars the lane keep is just annoying - here in Yorkshire the B road white lines are either non-existent or it's a narrow road and you just end up fighting the system. Thankfully one button on the steering wheel turns it off