Lane assist - does anyone actually like it?

[mccririck]

It irritates me that it's always on when you start up as I end up switching it off every trip when I notice it pulling the steering wheel.

[Edela]

I never had a chance to drive in UK so I may only guess why, but I see online that only (or mostly) people from there are complaining about lane assist. In EU I never had issues with lane assist except when had to drive on roads covered in snow, where the track cars made did not alight with road markings.

[mccririck]

I doubt it's anything specific to UK roads. There are times it is better to position your car to one side of the lane you are in and feeling the steering tug is just irritating. If you're driving on country roads it gets very annoying.

[zorglub]

i ve permanently disable it with OBD11

 

dream of doing the same with the start&stop (worse calibrating one i ever had on a car !)

[Boxerdog1]

Standard routine when I get in car ...... Press the start button and immediately turn off stop start and lane assist 🙂

[Paws4Thot]

2 hours ago, mccririck said:

I doubt it's anything specific to UK roads. There are times it is better to position your car to one side of the lane you are in and feeling the steering tug is just irritating. If you're driving on country roads it gets very annoying.

Absolutely agreed, especially when it's wet and the road has worn into shallow ruts. In this situation you absolutely need to drive to the side of the lane to avoid aquaplaning.

[mccririck]

3 hours ago, zorglub said:

i ve permanently disable it with OBD11

 

dream of doing the same with the start&stop (worse calibrating one i ever had on a car !)

Is that easy to do?

 

What's wrong with start/stop?

[SouthernComfort]

No problem with lane assist. It doesn't exactly wrench the wheel out of your hands, in fact I'd describe it as more of a gentle 'reminder nudge'. Nearly all current gen cars are full of these tech features, it would surely drive me crazy to sit there disabling everything from lane assist to auto door locking every time I get in the car!

If you've paid out the money for a hi-tech 'simply clever' car, why sit there disabling everything every time you get in it? Personally I'm happy to embrace the technology. If you can't, then maybe swap for it a more basic model of something, or get an older car...

[mccririck]

1 hour ago, SouthernComfort said:

No problem with lane assist. It doesn't exactly wrench the wheel out of your hands, in fact I'd describe it as more of a gentle 'reminder nudge'. Nearly all current gen cars are full of these tech features, it would surely drive me crazy to sit there disabling everything from lane assist to auto door locking every time I get in the car!

If you've paid out the money for a hi-tech 'simply clever' car, why sit there disabling everything every time you get in it? Personally I'm happy to embrace the technology. If you can't, then maybe swap for it a more basic model of something, or get an older car...

I disable lane assist because it's annoying. I don't want to feel unnecessary "reminder nudges" when I'm focusing on the road. As I've already pointed out you feel it when you are deliberately off-centre on the road and there can be legitimate reasons for being off the centre line. I doubt many people purchased the car because it has lane assist. It was forced upon us - bundled in with everything else.

Edited 9 November, 2023 by mccririck

[SteveTheElder]

I’m pretty happy with the lane assist and no problem with the nudges. I turned off the steering wheel vibration though, and would like to turn off the bong too but last time I checked that wasn’t an option.

I would take unnecessary nudges any day over an inadvertent/erroneous drift out of the lane.

 

I do think there could be a UK ‘thing’ about it. I’m recently back from five weeks driving around France, anything from autoroute to minor single track roads. Far fewer nudges even though it was active a similar proportion of the time. The nudges seemed more gentle too. Nothing scientific in that, just a gut feel.

 

I reckon Lane Assist is required for ACC so another reason not to disable it.

[mccririck]

And what is ACC?

[SteveTheElder]

19 minutes ago, mccririck said:

And what is ACC?

Adaptive Cruise Control 

[mccririck]

9 minutes ago, SteveTheElder said:

Adaptive Cruise Control 

Sure, if you are using that. Most of the time people aren't and it's very easy to switch lane assist on and off. I haven't used ACC at all so far and it's not something you'd use on country roads or in town where lane assist is most annoying.

[SteveTheElder]

Guess we’re all different; I use ACC a lot.

[Gerrycan]

1 hour ago, SteveTheElder said:

Guess we’re all different; I use ACC a lot.

I think it also depends on the road environment you are driving.

Don't have ACC but would think it would be pretty useless on a twisting country lane unless you had a good driver in front ?

Motorways and urban roads I would think they would be effective, unless the driver is inclined to be aggressive?

 

Got simple cruise control on our manual Octavia and it is a godsend on our South Australian long flat, straight (mostly single lane each way, undivided) highways.

 

Sorry for high jacking the thread but I have a question about ACC:

On our highways I'm happy to sit about 4 seconds behind a big truck doing an honest 100kph where there is little advantage or need to overtake and I have on occasion had people driving unsafely close to my tail who I am happy let through to get rid of them. They then sit right on the truck's tail with the brake lights flickering incessantly but not really making any effort to overtake (it would be really dangerous anyway from that spot). I've assumed they were just useless drivers who did not know how to set the ACC distance correctly, or it was malfunctioning, and the flickering braking was the ACC trying to manage a difficult situation and probably ruining fuel consumption in the process? Does this seem a feasible assumption?

 

Had lane assist on a hire car on a Northern Territory holiday and if I forgot to turn it off it was a real pain especially when I was looking to overtake B-Double/Triples on our single lane highways.

I also did not like the ACC in that car because it drove too close to the vehicle in front for my comfort despite being on the longest distance setting.

I read many car reviews and it seems that the effectiveness of lane assist (and other electronic safety aids) varies a lot between manufacturers/models and the performance of the systems  is not necessarily related to the price of the car.

Edited 10 November, 2023 by Gerrycan

[SouthernComfort]

Personal preferences are always subjective, so each to his/her own as to which features we find useful - or not. Some features just take some getting used to, after a while their attributes might become more apparent. About a year ago a friend of mine told me how Lane Assist on her 2019 BMW saved her life, and possibly others. Returning home late evening after a gruelling 3 day conference interstate, she foolishly (by her own admission) drove home from the airport whilst dog tired. Collected her bag, hit the freeway and then momentarily dozed. Lane Assist vibrated the wheel which stirred her, then did it's thing to keep the car in lane. It gave her a nasty fright and she has vowed to take a cab if seriously fatigued in future, but the fact remains that LA and ACC were there when needed most. Probably goes without saying that she wouldn't be without those features and based on her experience alone, nor would I. Maybe disabling LA and ACC has merit in some driving environments, but the default to ON is no bad thing IMO.

[Paws4Thot]

1 hour ago, Gerrycan said:

On our highways I'm happy to sit about 4 seconds behind a big truck doing an honest 100kph where there is little advantage or need to overtake and I have on occasion had people driving unsafely close to my tail who I am happy let through to get rid of them. They then sit right on the truck's tail with the brake lights flickering incessantly but not really making any effort to overtake

Similarly, even before ACC was actually a thing at all. In which context I could hold that sort of separation distance for miles at a time without ever even touching the brakes, or actively thinking about use of throttle. I would most likely acquire a tailg!t between towns though...

[SouthernComfort]

2 hours ago, Gerrycan said:

I think it also depends on the road environment you are driving.

Don't have ACC but would think it would be pretty useless on a twisting country lane unless you had a good driver in front ?

Motorways and urban roads I would think they would be effective, unless the driver is inclined to be aggressive?

 

Got simple cruise control on our manual Octavia and it is a godsend on our South Australian long flat, straight (mostly single lane each way, undivided) highways.

 

Sorry for high jacking the thread but I have a question about ACC:

On our highways I'm happy to sit about 4 seconds behind a big truck doing an honest 100kph where there is little advantage or need to overtake and I have on occasion had people driving unsafely close to my tail who I am happy let through to get rid of them. They then sit right on the truck's tail with the brake lights flickering incessantly but not really making any effort to overtake (it would be really dangerous anyway from that spot). I've assumed they were just useless drivers who did not know how to set the ACC distance correctly, or it was malfunctioning, and the flickering braking was the ACC trying to manage a difficult situation and probably ruining fuel consumption in the process? Does this seem a feasible assumption?

 

Had lane assist on a hire car on a Northern Territory holiday and if I forgot to turn it off it was a real pain especially when I was looking to overtake B-Double/Triples on our single lane highways.

I also did not like the ACC in that car because it drove too close to the vehicle in front for my comfort despite being on the longest distance setting.

I read many car reviews and it seems that the effectiveness of lane assist (and other electronic safety aids) varies a lot between manufacturers/models and the performance of the systems  is not necessarily related to the price of the car.

Unless the vehicle in front suddenly slows down, the car just decelerates/accelerates to maintain set distance - as far as I know. On a sudden reduction of speed, the brake lights may do the flickering dance. I find the only downside with ACC is when the driver in front constantly changes speed, up, down, up again and so on, which pushes you into the same annoying pattern, I guess that's the time you'd want to overtake and reset. Behind the fairly constant 100kph truck, or a car on cruise it works well, distance set to medium.

[SteveTheElder]

4 hours ago, Gerrycan said:

On our highways I'm happy to sit about 4 seconds behind a big truck doing an honest 100kph where there is little advantage or need to overtake and I have on occasion had people driving unsafely close to my tail who I am happy let through to get rid of them. They then sit right on the truck's tail with the brake lights flickering incessantly but not really making any effort to overtake (it would be really dangerous anyway from that spot). I've assumed they were just useless drivers who did not know how to set the ACC distance correctly, or it was malfunctioning, and the flickering braking was the ACC trying to manage a difficult situation and probably ruining fuel consumption in the process? Does this seem a feasible assumption?

Yeah, I think that can happen with ACC, depending on the road gradient even without a vehicle in front. Once or twice I recall mine repeatedly slightly accelerating and decelerating. This on a very gentle incline and seemed to me that the amount of throttle adjustment needed was less the smallest increment the system could make. Bit like early digital audio recordings sounding harsh compared to a smoother analogue recording. Over time systems improved and increments got finer.

[avi4tor]

This topic has been raised before, and all the usual comments are coming from the usual posters.  So I shall repeat what I have said before - when I start the car the first thing I do is to disable lane assist and front assist.  I keep a Triumph Stag for when the errant behaviour of the Skoda's software designers really annoys me.  We don't buy new cars for the features, we buy them for reliability.  Which is why I had to trade in my 2011 Octavia - it was consuming far too much oil and flattened the battery every couple of weeks, otherwise I would still have it.

[Ootohere]

@Paws4ThotHave you driven yet a car with Lane Keep Assist? 

 

@mccririckIt is not nudging you to remind you that you are wandering out of a marked lane when you are under 40 mph is it?

Can you adjust yours for sensitivity and then pay attention to when it lets you know that you are maybe not keeping well in your lane?

If you indicate when changing lane.  Look, mirror, indicate if safe to change lane there is no nudge.

 

http://briskoda.net/forums/topic/486388-lane-assist-is-dangerous

 

 

Edited 10 November, 2023 by Rooted

[mccririck]

1 hour ago, Rooted said:

@Paws4ThotHave you driven yet a car with Lane Keep Assist? 

 

@mccririckIt is not nudging you to remind you that you are wandering out of a marked lane when you are under 40 mph is it?

Can you adjust yours for sensitivity and then pay attention to when it lets you know that you are maybe not keeping well in your lane?

If you indicate when changing lane.  Look, mirror, indicate if safe to change lane there is no nudge.

 

http://briskoda.net/forums/topic/486388-lane-assist-is-dangerous

 

 

Sure if you indicate there is no nudge. I'm talking about when you aren't actually changing lanes and it feels the need to nudge you, even though you know what you're doing. Also I suspect it would nudge you if someone comes round the corner too fast towards you and drifts across the line so you take evasive action to the left. That wouldn't be appreciated either.

[Ootohere]

@mccririckIf they drift across to your side you are on your side.  If you are the one drifting, that is what the system is for.

 

If you leave it on then pay attention to what the road markings / lines are, kerb / verge side and centre line or line divider and see when you get that nudge, 

and pay attention on bends / corners and see when you get a nudge / lane assist action. 

 

It will not stop you driving with due care and attention and taking any avoidance.  It might show you that you do not want to go for a Driving Test resit. 

 

I do not mean that in a nasty way.   In my MINI in Edinburgh i miss the gentle lane assist i had in my Corsa Electric or in the other cars i drive.  The MINI has a light shows but no NUDGE.

I left the Systems  on, and will leave them on even when there is Snow, Ploughed roads etc.   It showed me just how poor my driving had become, lack of attention sometimes.

 

Occasionally on fast hill roads i do put Lane Keep Assist off where there are patched roads with long lines of tar joining patches.

Edited 10 November, 2023 by Rooted

[Sussex]

16 hours ago, Paws4Thot said:

Absolutely agreed, especially when it's wet and the road has worn into shallow ruts. In this situation you absolutely need to drive to the side of the lane to avoid aquaplaning.

I only turn off in scenarios like this or when driving some quiet country roads

[Jorgeminator]

11 hours ago, SteveTheElder said:

I reckon Lane Assist is required for ACC so another reason not to disable it.

ACC and Travel Assist work flawlessly even without Lane Assist.