So Much for Technology!

I want this for my horn:

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

LOL! Undocumented features.

Back to the horns:
I always installed Fiamm Freeway Blasters on my bikes. I think I made a guy in a pickup truck wet his pants once. His head definitely hit the roof of his cab. (Another good reason to buckle up.) Next time, maybe he looked before changing lanes. Or at least rolled up his window.

 

I remember these being advertised a decade or two ago. Perhaps it ended up being not ready for primetime then, like the early cylinder deactivation systems. Tucker had a headlight on his car that turned with the wheels, and that is just starting to come back.

 

I think that was a contributing factor for a minor route change on the annual Seattle-to-Vancouver bike ride.

Though I cut out at the border this year to go watch the great eclipse.

 

As an ex-gf's dad used to say, teenagers are walking suicide attempts.

This won't get fixed until auto-braking extends to skateboards and bicycles too.

Those closest I've witnessed was when my wife was starting to pull out of a steep uphill parallel parking space, in very deep dusk as we left a local community festival. Suddenly a teen sitting on a skateboard came blasting down right next to the line of parked cars on our side, such that his head was below the window beltline and hidden by the bodies of the cars ahead. He slid off the board to use his butt as a brake just barely before colliding with the outcoming front corner of our car.

An ambulance was parked on standby (for the festival) just across the street. The driver instantly went into furious parent mode and read the kid the riot act.

A few weeks ago in West Seattle, a skateboarder wasn't so lucky when he failed to allow for a stop sign at the bottom of a steep hill. Organ donor.

 

Our then 2004 Lexus RX 330 had AFS, the "headlights that turn with the steering wheel". And our current RX450h also as AFS. I think the only Toyota to ever get that has been a Japanese market only model which was basically the Lexus RX, can't remember the name though.

The tech was ready, but the consumers weren't willing to pay for it. Cheap IR sensors have only just begun to reduce in price. Remember that a Model Year 2020 car is designed in 2014/2015. 4-5 years of design before release is very standard. So when a tech becomes cheap today, it won't be in the next generation vehicle, it will be in the next next generation of vehicles just because of the way cycles work. The only current mainstream-ish company to not follow this is Tesla. When something new and shiny comes out and it's ready, they stick it on a new car, maybe without even telling the customer so that they can via software swap to the new hardware. I mean Tesla's even have entire secondary processing units just sitting there collecting dust. Never used for anything... yet. But they are there. So in 10 years, they may be used.

But on a $25k car, few people are going to pay for a $5k option to have night vision super-powers. But on a $100k or $150k car, people pay $5k just to get a different colour of paint, what's an extra $5k for night vision? Different buyers, different markets.

 

Automotive night vision - Wikipedia

The Lexus system came out in 2002.

 

The PHEV has lights that go around corners now though.


iPhone ?

 

Could never happen. We keep all our priceless Ming Dynasty vases and curios in the house, and not on the back patio.

 

The site is not putting quotes in for me at the moment!

Ferrari lover, re headlights that shine round corners, we have this on the 2017 Prius PHEV in Europe, but as I understand it, the U.S. Prime doesn't (yet?) have it.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

I don’t follow where you’re coming from here; Toyota has never claimed that the Prius Prime is capable of any form of autonomous driving, let alone full Level-5 Autonomy.

Autonomous-driving cars need, and have, vastly more sophisticated systems than the Prius Prime’s. Full Level-5 Autonomous cars construct a model of all objects around them: “car in front of me is 12ft ahead going 40MPH, car in the left oncoming lane coming at me at 42MPH, car in the left lane 5ft ahead and another 8ft behind, just passed a pedestrian on the sidewalk over there,” etc. They construct that image/model of the world around them with “sensor fusion”: cross-referencing imagery from radar, cameras around the car, often LIDAR.

The Prius Prime’s radar cruise control and emergency braking system are **vastly** less sophisticated than that. They are more like knee-jerk reflex actions: If a radar return comes in, so-and-so MPH slower than we’re driving, it pops up a “STOP” warning, and the brakes if it gets much closer. It’s only “smart” enough to do that. It has no idea what it is or whether it’s turning out of the way, what other cars are around, it doesn’t try to relate that radar return to anything it sees in the camera, and so forth. It’s not even as “smart” as a fruit fly!


iPhone ? Pro

 

Sorry this description of the DRCC its not correct.

It is certainly not autonomous driving or anywhere near, but it is much more intelligent than you describe.

You only have to use it to know that it can for example tell the difference between a car that is close in front and going at a constant speed, and one that had just overtaken it, and is very close but moving away from the car.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Yes, absolutely. As I alluded, it can tell range and speed of objects in the radar’s line of sight. If it’s going slower than we are, and gets within so-and-so distance, it pops up a STOP warning, and then within so-and-so closer distance it applies the brakes itself. But that’s pretty much the limit of its “smarts.”

Autonomous-Driving Systems have far more sophisticated sensor fusion, artificial cognition of the world around them, and artificial intelligence.

iPhone ? Pro

 

Both our optically based, BMW i3-REx, and radar based, Prius Prime can not tell that a car in my lane is turning off the road in front. So I've gotten used to applying the accelerator until the dynamic cruise control resumes speed maintenance.

Bob Wilson

 

Indeed...

The P.Prime’s radar functions are very-welcome driver-assistance, but they only do ... what they do.

iPhone ? Pro

 

My Gen 4 Prius has the same system. A couple of times I have has a "false breaking" event. Where the road curves left with the Prius in the left lane, a tractor trailer (lorry) pulled out from a truck stop into the right lane. The DRCC sees that as a slower vehicle ahead and breaks fairly aggressively.

 

Yes...

I tend to think of the Prius’ radar functions as a tool for expanding my awareness of the situation around me: Without these functions, I need to concentrate ... perhaps 80% on the car(s) ahead of me and 20% on everything else. With them, I have enough confidence to drop that to, perhaps 65% of my attention to the situation in front of me, and can increase my awareness of the cars all around me.


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Wow. Feel honoured in the UK then!!!


iPhone ?

 

No solar-panel-roof option here either... I read somewhere that there was some rollover-related regulation — don’t recall exactly what — that it couldn’t meet with the solar panel, and I suspect that between the fact that it adds cost and generates only a little bit of power anyway, it wasn’t worthwhile to figure out how to meet that regulation.

I presume the headlights are the same — some sort of weird US Law...

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