George Knighton

Are you using ACC and LKAS consistently?

I drive at least two hours/day, and I've got used to it for the most part. I find that ACC in particular allows me to arrive more refreshed than usual, when I'd have to monitor and correct for traffic that varies over a long commute, from 20 mph up to 60 mph, and with several traffic lights.

You have to get used to keeping an ear out for the little beeps that signal when ACC has acquired or lost a target, or when LKAS has lost the view of the lines.

I've got a dumb question, though.

Does ACC really take off again from a stop the way that it is supposed to?

If it does take off again, it waits too long. I guess it must wait for the safe following distance to develop before it takes off. But if that's what it is doing, it's waiting long enough for cars behind me to begin to feel that I've dozed off, so I always take off from a stop light with a manual throttle, and then let ACC take off again when I get close to the following speed.

Two hash following distance seems to be okay for me. I am personally a tiny bit more comfortable with three hashes, but that leads fast cars behind me to get nervous that I'm the one holding up the works instead of the car ahead of me.

:-)

holografique

The first month or so that I had my RLX I exclusively used ACC to drive to and from work. I wanted to see just how much I could keep my feet off the gas pedal. I eventually got used to the delay it has when resuming from a full stop.

What I will say is this:

They need to develop a different set of beep/alert tones for the various warnings. Having the same sound for all the various alerts isn't supporting the safety goals of these warning systems. The biggest problem right now is that the Blind-Spot Information system uses the exact same beep tone (and rhythm) as the LDW. Overtime, you learn to mentally suppress the beep tone because LDW can be very sensitive and you just know to correct steering. But what that now has created is a lack of sensitivity to the same beep tone when the Blind-Spot Information System is telling you "DON'T CHANGE LANES!!". It's happened already to me a few times where I heard the beep as I was about to change lanes and a few seconds later I realized "oh shit! that's not LDW, that's Blind-Spot!!!!" and nearly avoided an accident.

Not a good design in my opinion. I understand that the driver's responsibility is to look at their side-view mirrors first and also see the visual cue, but we all know that even the safest drivers at times forget to check their views and will start to merge into another lane. This is where Blind-Spot Information should take the extra step to prevent from those types of scenarios. It should be a far more alerting sound since it carries a much larger risk of harm to the driver than potentially swaying out of a lane, and I would go as far as to say it should include an audible voice saying "Warning, Warning" or "Do not pass, Do not pass".

George Knighton

Although I'm not as disturbed about it, I have to admit that a distinctive tone would be good so that I'm clearer about what it is the car's trying to say.

miner

I am still getting accustomed to the ACC for stop 'n go traffic. For that case I use the closest distance to keep from delaying the start up once traffic flows again. I also found it is based upon what cruise speed you have set; i.e. 50mph cruise gets back up to speed quicker than cruise set at 35 mph.

Still learning so if anyone has suggestions I am all ear (as Van Gogh would say).

Doby

I use both on a regular basis. I find the shortest distance on ACC is too far as I constantly find people go around me or cut in front of me, subsequently panicking the system if I don't cancel it.


Fortunately a quick press of cancel on the steering wheel prevents that, and then a quick up click for resume gets me going once enough distance is made. I find this cancel/resume method better than allow the system to correct for excessive speed in many situations as the braking is by far to aggressive.


Surprisingly the acceleration tends to be overly aggressive, which is amusing after a significant delay to start accelerating in the first place. Still well worth using for minor speed adjustments when in traffic or simply follow a car at an acceptable speed.


Regarding LKAS; I find the system works fairly well. Even when the turns are to tight it still dramatically lowers the amount of input needed on the wheel, which his nice. I only wish it wasn't so quick to turn off with lack of input, as I find it warns for needing input even when I do have my hands on the wheel but letting it do its thing.

Especially the LKAS help sell me on the car in the first place, I don't want to go without it. Now if they could only have a half decent Navigation system the car would be a real winner.

George Knighton

0_o

Wow. I use the setting that seems to give me two seconds of following space.

If I were using the one second setting and people were cutting in the way you describe, I swear I would move to somewhere else! That's just not right.

Where I live, work and travel, if you were using the one-second setting, there are many drivers who'd be signaling to you that you're too close to them.

ACC is not as smooth as I'd like for it to be but people who experience it in my car say that it works as well or better than it does in their cars, some of which cost about twice what my car cost.

getakey

I have not used the ACC much. The couple times I did at low speed, I felt like it was accelerating and braking much too often and that I could do a much smoother job myself

George Knighton

Oh, you absolutely could do a better job yourself! :-)

The question is, do you want to?

I seem to arrive home in the evenings a lot more refreshed than I did in the TL 6-6 and I think ACC has a lot to do with it...even if it's not very smooth and makes the brake lights come on with embarrassing frequency.

getakey

They need better fuzzy logic

George Knighton

Yes, well. I can certainly point them for that to a particular thread I'm thinking of.

victorber

My experience with ACC/CMBS is mostly as you all have described. My basic problems are with the jerky reactions when the sys detects a unexpected vehicle or person/animal and depending on the setting (1,2 or 3) it does not always react as I want it to. I think the system needs a more powerful CPU so the sharing of resources does not have to react at the last moment.

I will say without a doubt, the systems kept us from rear ending a more than few vehicles in 3 full "White-out", 50mph Blizzards with zero visibility and that the LKAS/LDW worked exceedingly well when we could not see the road edge's, and all the systems are worth every penny I paid for the installed technology.
When we came out of the Blizzard and saw many vehicles either in ditches or overturned we were ecstatic that we weren't one of them.

I was stationed in central Alaska in the early 60's and had to drive the Richardson(ALCAN) hwy and gained a lot of experience in blizzards and with dead Buffalo
laying in the roadway just waiting for a unsuspecting family to not see it in time.
The WY blizzards were worse than I have ever encountered.

I thank Honda/Acura for incorporating the advanced systems and hope the systems evolve and upgraded as time goes on.

Amen...

George Knighton

I turn off LKAS in the snow because in my experience it does *not* see the lanes very well.

Even after the snow, in my part of the world I find it problematic because it sees the lines of chemicals in the road as possible lanes and makes unusual corrections.

That's my experience in my part of the world, anyway. Maybe we use too many chemicals. :-)