[oxygen0211]

Of course, this needs to be fixed in one way or the other to achieve fully autonomous cars, as many others like destinguishing red traffic lights from other red lights. But that's why nobody calls it fully autonomous yet.

What always boggles me about such news is that people rely so much on these systems and apparently people drift away that they even don't notice an f*ing big red fire truck standing in their way. I often drive with dynamic cruise control (radar based, only keeping distance, breaking and speeding up, no steering), but I am in many situations in which I think "I need full control here" and temporarily disable it. Also, there are many situations where I don't use it in the first place because I know the way it functions is bringing downsides, such as driving on multi-lane roads (read: german Autobahn) since it will hold exactly that much distance to the car infront of me that every idiot will cut in, causing cruise control to decelerate to leave a bigger gap, rinse, repeat.

[mft_]

> What always boggles me about such news is that people rely so much on these systems and apparently people drift away that they even don't notice an f*ing big red fire truck standing in their way. I often drive with dynamic cruise control (radar based, only keeping distance, breaking and speeding up, no steering), but I am in many situations in which I think "I need full control here" and temporarily disable it.

Maybe you're not a typical case?

FWIW, I consider myself a pretty decent focussed driver, yet when I hired a car with dynamic cruise control a few months back, I was shocked how much losing responsibility for part of the driving experience --the gears, acceleration, and braking, obvs-- helped me to relax too much, and lose a little bit of focus. I was still steering, and it wasn't like there were even any near misses... but I just felt my attention wander too many times for comfort.

[oxygen0211]

Might be I'm not the typical user of this, probably also because as a software engineer I know how much guesswork and unsolved questions lies in these systems.

Of course, I also notice that my focus changes a bit, but it still stays on the traffic around me and I would consider it rather improbable that I would oversee a stopped vehicle infront of me, not to mention a fire truck on a mission.

Maybe it's also that I'm driving daily in and out of Stuttgart, one of the main traffic spots in southern Germany. There's a lot of cars and ignorant driving, especially in dense traffic or jams. Plus we have a rediculous amount of roundabouts in the meantime and there are a lot of people that decide to either push into the smalles gaps, shooting in from your side and forcing you to do heavy breaking or other people approaching an empty roundabout, doing a needles near-full stop, accelerate, just to decellerate again, almost coming to another near-full stop to get around the corner (never understand the thinking behind this :-| ). I don't trust adaptive cruise control in either of these situations.