The lane assist in my VW can get a little troublesome in areas of road construction where lane markers have been painted over and such. At times the car picks up the wrong lane area and encourages me to stay there instead of the real lane. It’s more of an annoyance than anything but it’s still a distraction when at highway speeds
I once had lane assist on a rental car (so one unknown to me) hide that one of the front tires had a flat until things got too bad to hide and then suddenly give up and dump the problem on me. Luckily no accident, but I'm certain that on a car without electronic support I would have felt earlier that something is odd.
Next version should detect whether a site is under-construction (# of cones per 100m, GPS-tagged construction zone from publicly available DB, sudden speed change, unexpected traffic etc.) and turn on the soft-mode for lane-assist where it says 'You might be driving through a construction zone, so lane assist will not fight'.
I feel that until a car can ascertain that it’s in a construction zone using only vision (like you and I do) we’ll never achieve what we need. Any autonomous system that relies on (or even incorporates) stored databases of any kind is implicitly worse than a teenage first time driver and should therefore not be considered acceptable.
Indeed, we don't get basic things like GPS signal 100% right 86400 seconds per day. Relying on some remote DB which can crash, be hacked, cut off from internet, down for maintenance etc will be a problem. Or car just losing data connection (like it happens with phones).
Its nice to dream about ideal future, but if lives rely on reliability, it either works 100%, or shouldn't.
100% is stronger than we need - humans are not 100%. If we were there would be no crashes. Even sudden mechanical failure could just affect the one car and not cause others if humans were perfect. We just need to be better than humans.
