Highway Assist - Dangerous lane positioning

[kabre]

This morning I needed to do quite a lot of motorway driving, so I expected to use Highway Assist for most of it as usual.  However, the lane keeping was different to normal and somewhat dangerous!  The car was consistently putting me on the very right hand side of of the lane regardless of which road I was on (A1, A14 or M11) and regardless which lane I was in (with either 2 or 3 lanes).  The car was keeping me so close to the edge of the lane that in the far right overtaking lane, where there are often cat eyes a few inches on the inside of solid lane boundary line, the car was clipping quite a few of them and a hairs width from the rest.  On slightly tighter motorway bends, the car was running over the cats eye and sometimes onto the white line / rumble strip since there was no margin for error.

The car knew exactly where it was in the lane, I know this because the display of the car relative to the lane and other traffic (on the right side of the large touchscreen console) showed the car to be exactly where it was - on the very right side of the lane, pretty much touching the right hand lane boundary with a large space between the car and the left hand lane boundary.

When I tried to manually correct and steer the car to the centre of the lane, the display lines marking the lane on-screen would switch from blue to white, but then as soon as the lane boundaries turned blue again the car would steer quite sharply to the right side of the lane again - and usually it would overcorrect and slightly cross the lane boundary line in doing so, before then recorrecting very right side of the lane.  The car seemed pretty accurate / consistent in keeping the exact same closeness to the right hand lane boundary, but it was a long way to the right of where the car should have been.  I had to keep switching to just adaptive cruise control because it was mostly too dangerous.

There was seemingly nothing I could do to correct this, I am hoping the next time I drive it will be back to positioning me in the middle of the lane - but why did it decide to use the right side of the lane for the whole of the 200 mile trip this morning!?  I don't see how it can be a calibration type issue because the car clearly knew where it was in the lane (as shown on the on screen display), but Highway Assist was seemingly choosing that far right was the best position in the lane for some reason!

The only think I can think is that it was dark - I am not sure how often I have used Highway Assist in in the dark since the last update - but why should that make a difference?  The roads were dry and visibility was otherwise good and the car was detecting where it was.

The Eletre is sold as targeting level 4 autonomy with future legislation changes and software updates, but if it can't do level 2 properly then that is somewhat fanciful?!

Has anyone else experienced consistently incorrect lane keeping?

 

[C8RKH]

2 hours ago, kabre said:

Has anyone else experienced consistently incorrect lane keeping?

Only usually from Audi drivers but no idea if they were driving the car themselves or letting a computer do it.

This trend of relying on "tech" to drive the car I find deeply worrying, especially as (or maybe because) I've worked in "tech" since 1985.

[Escape]

4 hours ago, C8RKH said:

This trend of relying on "tech" to drive the car I find deeply worrying, especially as (or maybe because) I've worked in "tech" since 1985.

Very much this! And things will no doubt get even worse with future generations, that know no better than to rely on tech for just about anything. I remember driving the 20-year old daughter of a friend home a while ago, and she was surprised to see me turn a switch to activate the headlights, convinced all cars would do that automatically. Newsflash, they often don't when it's foggy or raining but you do want your lights on in those situations. 

On a lighter note, are we sure there isn't a setting in the menu somewhere looking like this:

😉

Filip

 

[kabre]

I wouldn't want the car to get any wider as implied by the full justification option! 🙂

[kabre]

Follow up to this, I have done the same journey again, and the lane position problem did not repeat - I suspect that turning the car off for more than 15 mins forces a reboot when it restarts and some sort of recalibration!

However, another Highway assist issue - have others noticed that Highway Assist stops working in heavy rain / spray?  I can certainly see how accuracy might be impacted if the system is currently entirely camera based and not using the LIDAR sensors, but when it turns itself off it feels more like it is doing so because of a fault than it switching it off for safety reasons - some reason or error code as to why it turns off would be welcome.  But even in really terrible weather and after it has turned itself off, the identification of the lane boundaries, position of car within the boundaries, and the other vehicles around as shown on the centre display seems to still be spot on - in fact surprisingly good considering the conditions.  This has happened more than once, but only when rain / road spray is pretty bad.