I've recently purchased a new 2019 model year (came off the assembly lane around April-May 2020) Octavia MkIII combi Scout, including Lane Assist.

It's too aggressive. It pulls too often, a bit too early.

Can Lane Assist be adjusted to be less aggressive - to wait longer before it starts tugging on the steering wheel?

thanks,

-Jay

 

What is the problem of it correcting too early? Until my car had a new windscreen fitted (at only ~6 months old) I found that the lane assist kept the car pretty much in the middle of the lane because it was correcting often. Now (calibration issue possibly) it doesn't respond as quickly and it heads towards the white line before correcting. 

Hi @Swirly182, on my new Scout the lane assist rather often tugs on the steering wheel while the car is still very much in-lane and hasn't really yet begun to drift towards being out of lane. If I'm being generous, I'd say that lane assist is acting like a perfectionist, responding to keep the car dead-centre. But that's undesirable (unless it's a full auto-pilot, which it's not, this not being a Tesla :-) ). Lane Assist should only become noticeable to the driver if the driver is patently going to leave their lane, because otherwise lane assist is acting too often and is a distraction.

There's a very fine line between limited safety systems like lane assist providing safety and being a distraction. We don't want to expect a limited lane keeping function like Skoda's current (2019 model year Octavia MkIII) lane assist to keep the car perfectly centred, because 1. it is a constant distraction to the driver, and 2. it's not entirely accurate. So it needs to stay quiet until the driver more evidently fails to stay in-lane. (I'll assert that I'm extremely good at lane-keeping, and so lane assist is activating entirely unnecessarily about 98% of the time).

So I go back to my original question: Can Lane Assist be configured to "fire later" rather than (As it seems to be now) "fire earlier"?

thanks.

Turn it off is my answer. I have. I dont rely on these systems to keep me in lane as I have eyes to do that.

Just now, Ecomatt said:

Turn it off is my answer. I have. I dont rely on these systems to keep me in lane as I have eyes to do that.

@Ecomatt haha, of course I could do that, but then that would defeat the purpose of having explicitly bought this feature to help keep me (and everyone around me) safe on those rare (but, for all of us without exception, present) occasions when we fail to be as perfect drivers as we wish we (and everyone else) would be.

The question remains: How to make Lane Assist do it's job (and do only it's job, recover from actual errors, not try to be an autopilot that it isn't engineered to be) ?

Just now, JayLibove said:

@Ecomatt haha, of course I could do that, but then that would defeat the purpose of having explicitly bought this feature to help keep me (and everyone around me) safe on those rare (but, for all of us without exception, present) occasions when we fail to be as perfect drivers as we wish we (and everyone else) would be.

The question remains: How to make Lane Assist do it's job (and do only it's job, recover from actual errors, not try to be an autopilot that it isn't engineered to be) ?

The answer is as far as I am aware you cant.

We have been driving cars for years without these aids and they are not needed. I find aids like these actually switch peoples reactions off as they are too reliant on them to help driving. 

 

Hi @Ecomatt I hope you'll be willing to agree to disagree (or even possibly to be persuaded) that, unless and until full, provably more-reliable-than-humans autopilot is available (in which case I would desire the road regulations to impose autopilots on all cars, because it would be safer, even taking into account well-designed degradation and failure modes such as would be required to say that we're at that point), WELL-DESIGNED safety features that only act when they must - unlike Skoda's current Lane Assist which definitely acts too early and too often and is a distraction - STILL are desirable and necessary features against the large number of not-good and/or distracted drivers out there.

So, please, no more suggestions to just turn it off. I'm looking for how to fix it. A computer adjustment via VCDS/EBDeleven? A Skoda dealer network modification? A group complaint by us drivers who find the current design worse-than-lacking to Skoda's design department? etc

thanks,

 

Good luck with the group action. In the unlikely event that you can prove anything is wrong with Lane Assist,  Skoda is notoriously the last of the VAG group to take responsibility for well-documented design faults. Lane Assist is is just part of the car’s overall safety aids. Until all UK roads are well marked I can’t see how we can have autonomous driving. The safest thing we as drivers can do is, drive to the prevailing conditions, take breaks to avoid nodding off at the wheel and declare known medical conditions. 

3 hours ago, Redboy said:

Good luck with the group action. In the unlikely event that you can prove anything is wrong with Lane Assist,  Skoda is notoriously the last of the VAG group to take responsibility for well-documented design faults. Lane Assist is is just part of the car’s overall safety aids. Until all UK roads are well marked I can’t see how we can have autonomous driving. The safest thing we as drivers can do is, drive to the prevailing conditions, take breaks to avoid nodding off at the wheel and declare known medical conditions. 

Interesting point - you mention the UK roads. I'm actually in Spain, where, perversely and/or thankyouverymuch Northern Europe for the investment over the past couple of decades .. many of the roads are in excellent condition, including markings. And still Lane Assist fires too early, too often.

 

I did find some discussions in a Volkswagen forum about this, although about 2016 and 2017 cars, and with some notes about the tweaks possibly not being available in later model years.

Here's a note from an OBDeleven user:

Quote

A5 - Front Sensors Driver Assistance – Coding
Select: Point__of_intervention
Choose: late; early; early (setting via menu); late (setting via menu) (default for 2017 = late)

 

I also saw someone else refer to the configuration as Intervention Moment.

 

I've ordered an OBDelevent and a Pro license. (Per their website it may take 3-4 weeks to arrive).

When it does I'll dig through and see what I can find, and what the effects will be. (I ordered it primarily to try to turn on Traffic Sign Recognition, but it will be great gravy if I can change what I assume is the default "early" setting on Lane Assist point of intervention/ intervention moment to "late"!)

 

About proving the point to Skoda, yeah, companies can be real pains in the ***. (I have no idea how the telephone and utility companies are in the UK; I've fought - and mostly won - consumer protection battles against several of the phone companies and all of the major utility companies here in Spain over the past decade. Pyrrhic in some cases - the time invested not worth the losses recovered, but I look at it from the macroeconomic perspective of hoping that I'm part of a tipping point, just enough of us making the companies spend a bunch of money because they chose to do the wrong thing in the first place, that eventually they'll start to do the right thing in the first place).

So, Skoda, Lane Assist, etc, the hope is simply that enough people's answer being "paid for the feature, had to turn it off because it didn't work well enough" would prompt the company to Just Fix The Darn Thing.

 

warm regards all, stay tuned, and any further ideas and suggestions most welcome,

-Jay

Ribes de Freser (Girona), Spain

 

@JayLibove I have the option to adjust this setting in my ‘17 plate vRS so I assume you should be able to do the same.
 

It can be set Active and only responds when crossing (or as near as) the white lines or set Adaptive Lane Guidance which keeps the vehicle in the middle of the lane in which it’s currently travelling (i.e. being more responsive).

 

I have a button on the steering wheel that turns lane assist on and off however it will not adjust the sensitivity.
 

To do this I have to go in to the vehicle settings on the touch screen.

 

Edit: See the OP in the thread below, this may explain it better/show you the correct menu to navigate to.

 

I can imagine that if Adaptive Lane Assist is on without you realising then you’ll be fighting it all the time. As I’ve never turned mine on I’m not 100% on this but worth a look and I’ll happily stand corrected if someone chips in with more info.

 

 

Edited 28 November, 20205 yr by CookieMonster87

@CookieMonster87The adaptive option means it has a limited ability to learn your road position and use that as the datum. Its not a sensitivity adjustment.

I stand corrected! 

I actually found these posts on the Skoda Storyboard:

This first one states that Lane Assist works above 65km/hr. This, I guess, is what the feature does when the Lane Assist feature is "Active" (activate, on, not disabled). This is the thing that I find too aggressive.

 

Next:

Although this appears under "Traffic Jam Assist" (which I will now further investigate to see if I can OBDeleven enable... hehheh .. Oh, maybe not: https://forum.obdeleven.com/thread/6856/traffic-jam-assist as it seems to require actually flashing additional software onto the car, which goes a bit beyond what I'm willing to try, just yet!) it discusses "adaptive lane guidance" as a sub-feature of Lane Assist, and it describes it as "helps the vehicle to stay in the lane at speeds below 60km/hr". I'm not sure why Skoda would call "below 60km/hr" "adaptive lane guidance", and "above 65km/hr" "Lane Assist". But neither of them seems to include tuning the aggressiveness of the feature (per @ExSEAT's comment).

 

@ExSEAT I'm a little confused, what do you mean when you noted that "it has a limited ability to learn your road position and use that as the datum"? "Learn" to me implies developing a model of how an individual driver drives, which I'd hope Lane Assist would not do since its goal is to drive better than we do...  Also, your description sounds a bit different from Skoda's Storyboard explanation.

Could you clarify please?

 

Thanks everyone.

 

 

 

Normal lane assist activates when approaching the line. Adaptive tries to keep the car centred to where the driver seems to want to be and is therefore making more adjustments and will be more intrusive.

 

Really don't see the big issue here, its an assist. In general the driver should be the one keeping the car between the lines. I rarely have it activated

Thanks @ExSEAT, your description is how I'd expect Lane Assist to work. How I've actually experienced it working is that it's a perfectionist, frequently tapping the steering wheel frankly earlier than is needed to do adequate lane-keeping. This makes it sound like my experience is what you describe as "adaptive". I'll re-check whether I have an adaptive setting under the Lane Assist configuration, and if I turn it off whether that takes care of the annoyance.

Thanks, I'll post back - probably after tomorrow (no plans to go out driving today!)

 

I have this in my mqb octy.

 

https://comma.ai/

 

I've done thousands of miles in the UK using this bit of kit. There's a discord group that helps with development and adding new cars. It works on all mqb vehicles and pq35/46 and lots of other cars too.

 

Below vid was the first time I got setup and working.

 I mainly use it for long trips, I do a 3 hour round trip twice a month. It makes motorway driving very chill. 

 

Go on YouTube and type in openpilot and watches few vids.

 

 

Just to add, You do not need to already have LKAS for the above system to work on your MQB car as all MQB steering racks are electric and capable of being coded to have LKAS installed via vcds. it intercepts HCA commands and using a much better driving model than the stock LKAS system to aid driving.

Thanks @Cd01101, very cool that these sorts of things can be added to even the more base models of these cars.

For now, I'd still prefer to stay with factory provided (even if not factory-enabled) features (and anyway as my car does have Lane Assist and Adaptive Cruise Control I hope to be able to tweak things to my liking with less investment in new toys).

warm regards,

 

Kudos to @ExSEAT - it is indeed the "adaptive" option within Lane Assist which makes the car behave like a hyper-coffeinated mother-in-law (apologies to all the mothers-in-law out there; my dearly departed one was a wonder of a person, and we miss her) about stay EXACTLY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LANE!

With the "adaptive" (why would they call it that??) option turned off, Lane Assist does just what I want.

thanks!

 

On 29/11/2020 at 09:41, ExSEAT said:

Normal lane assist activates when approaching the line. Adaptive tries to keep the car centred to where the driver seems to want to be and is therefore making more adjustments and will be more intrusive.

 

Really don't see the big issue here, its an assist. In general the driver should be the one keeping the car between the lines. I rarely have it activated