Toyota Safety Sense

wadle5

New member
Well look at this! Appears Toyota is finally jumping on board with the likes of Tesla, Subaru, and other manufactures with a more automated driving vehicle full of electronic safety features.

Because lets be honest as the general populous becomes more stupid we need cars that are smarter.


Toyota Safety Sense

In short "TSS features help address three key areas of accident protection: mitigating or preventing frontal collisions, helping to keep drivers within their lane, and enhancing road safety during nighttime driving"
 
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Except LDA doesn't work most of the time because most roads have poor markings, won't work on snow-covered roads, doesn't really seem to like some painted lines... and when it does kick in it hardly does much besides barely nudges you back onto the road.

Haven't played with PCS much, but it's solely dependent on calibration (in fact it's strongly emphasized in the instructions that placement of the reflectors and such is critical as there's no way to verify correct calibration otherwise as the system is calibrated relative to the reflectors, though they do give you some margin of error), so much so that if it was calibrated wrong at the shop you or the tech wouldn't know unless bad things happen (just waiting to see an improperly calibrated PCS system cause an issue; it'll be a rare occurrence but it'll be an inevitability for sure). So probably any fender bender, or even light bump will tweak it if it's going to be as much of a sensitive ninny like BSM.

BSM has been a nightmare lately, seems like Tacomas are the worst of the bunch. If they're not somehow getting out of compensation just driving, any slight bump on the rear bumper is knocking the systems out of whack.

But hey, it's the future man. Go ahead and trust your car to stop you when it hits a patch of ice and over-corrects because it doesn't understand how ice works and then tries to prevent you from dying by slamming the brakes early and letting the guy in the diesel behind you turn you into a Toyota pancake. :)

This "grey area" of autonomous cars is downright scary to me given how truly sensitive and very easily screwed up these systems are right now. I wouldn't trust my life to them given the option. I'll wait for the guinea pigs to work out the kinks for me and get my real self-driving cars.
 
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I'm with him^^^
i don't think I could ever put my trust in the computer to save my a** when it comes to panic stopping etc.
But as time goes on there will be more and more of these systems on the road everywhere you go. Including right next to you and behind you, it truly scares the hell out of me
 
I'm with him^^^
i don't think I could ever put my trust in the computer to save my a** when it comes to panic stopping etc.
But as time goes on there will be more and more of these systems on the road everywhere you go. Including right next to you and behind you, it truly scares the hell out of me

To be fair, I'm not saying that I wouldn't trust a computer to do it. I've seen some demonstrations and the fancier stuff that's been played with off the streets in R&D have me very interested.

But current generation, on the road right now, stuff is a bit too grey area for me. A good example would be to look at that older Top Gear episode where Clarkson has James run at him with his Mazda and it stops before it hits him, but when doing parking maneuvers he bonks James' car (granted most of these systems shut off below 30mph because I'm assuming the systems can't be reliable enough and/or not intrusive enough). The technology shown there was/is not much different than what's rolling on the streets now.

Compared to what's being worked on in the R&D labs, it's practically stone-age. So I'll bide my time in my archaic 4Runner and wait for the good stuff to hit the streets in a few more years. :) When someone has the balls to release a human transportation device that has no steering wheel, brakes, and/or manual input from the driver and they're willing to stand by it 100%; then you'll know the technology has gotten there, until then it's very much a "you're the Beta Tester" situation and if the software industry is any metric to go by... you don't want to be the Beta Tester, because ALL new products are never finished and are always half-baked at release.
 
We are in a transition phase between old school and fully self driving. Transitions always suck. I have never transitioned anything ever without problems.
 
I will gladly let all of the trusting technophiles in their Teslas beta test 'Self Driving' for me. I've seen enough videos of the cars slamming in to a jersey wall in a construction zone or driving right in to a Jack knifed tractor trailer to tell me the tech is not mature yet.

As for driving aids - I'll gladly take adaptive cruise control.
 
I find it amusing that if you suggested a pilot-less airplane to folks they would probably freak out. They would surely die without some person at the helm. But a driver-less car sounds cool to these same folks.

A smartphone is decked out with enough processing power and sensors to keep a plane in the air. You have lots of room, aircraft fly "by the numbers" pretty predictably. About the only maneuver a plane does that has to be precision executed down to the foot is taxiing on the ground, takeoff, and landing, and given the controlled environment that happens in with consistent runway markings and landing guidance systems to get you down to the ground, even that would be relatively easy to program a computer to do. Not taking anything away from pilots, it still takes a ton of skill, but the kind of skills and data involved is more logical for computers to accept and interpret.

Driving a car to a computer is messy. Everything is moving, everything is changing, and it doesn't follow any hard and fast rules. You don't know what other objects will do, it's a nightmare to program a computer to figure out the infinite amount of variables. It's a more fluid and spontaneous environment, humans are much better at sorting through all this random but still relevant information and weeding out what to focus on and what can be ignored.

But folks are hunky dory over letting a computer drive them around, because it will be "safer."
 
The Land Cruiser is $85,000
Yeah. . .but but. . have you seen the things. Dealership has 2 of them on the lot. Seats 7. . .ultimate luxury, but an absolute brute off road(as long as the trail is wide enough for them). Figured at 85k why cant you have your cake and eat it too?

I will gladly let all of the trusting technophiles in their Teslas beta test 'Self Driving' for me. I've seen enough videos of the cars slamming in to a jersey wall in a construction zone or driving right in to a Jack knifed tractor trailer to tell me the tech is not mature yet.

As for driving aids - I'll gladly take adaptive cruise control.
My thoughts exactly. Have you seen the one of the tesla on a winding road at night with clear pavement markings and the car goes into oncoming several times. While I do think its great the advances in technology we have seen, the problem is as always the human element. If you don't like driving, but need to get somewhere, instead of relying on auto-pilot and again emphasized as stated from the company "In beta-testing mode, and not responsible for any incidences/accidents that may occur" makes me think that maybe that person who doesn't like cars/driving should just take this tried and true thing called public transport and leave the job to a professional driver. Then you have the element of even if the individual is in an automated car, what about the other horrible drivers out there on the road. You can test, back test, re-test, calibrate, and test again as many times as you want, but as we see with basic car design/mistakes there is always that one human out there who has thought of something and tested the car in a way no R&D department has ever thought of and thus breaks something.


That's sugar coating it.
Didn't want to offend some delicate flower on the interwebs
 
Yeah. . .but but. . have you seen the things. Dealership has 2 of them on the lot. Seats 7. . .ultimate luxury, but an absolute brute off road(as long as the trail is wide enough for them). Figured at 85k why cant you have your cake and eat it too?

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Yeah, i was looking at one last week on the dealership floor, So nice.
 
Here in Pittsburgh, Uber have had their self driving cars on the roads for a long time. You would be surprised just how far the tech has come. I have been super sceptical of the technology, I even turned down an engineering job there being worried about future job security, but I have to admit now it's pretty good and pretty safe. The cars just plod along at low speeds and do their thing nicely. They're not crashing into stuff and they get you from A to B just as quick as a human driver does in inner city and urban traffic conditions.
They will become the norm for basic city transportation needs, I have no doubt about that now. But I wouldn't expect it to take over anything high speed, commercial or recreational​ in the foreseeable future.

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my mom's '16 prius has TSS, but they smartly/conveniently leave out the best feature (blind spot monitoring) for which you have to pay extra for.

lane departure is annoying, i leave it off everytime i drive it, and if you NEED it..you probably shouldnt be driving anyway.
 
Here in Pittsburgh, Uber have had their self driving cars on the roads for a long time. You would be surprised just how far the tech has come. I have been super sceptical of the technology, I even turned down an engineering job there being worried about future job security, but I have to admit now it's pretty good and pretty safe. The cars just plod along at low speeds and do their thing nicely. They're not crashing into stuff and they get you from A to B just as quick as a human driver does in inner city and urban traffic conditions.
They will become the norm for basic city transportation needs, I have no doubt about that now. But I wouldn't expect it to take over anything high speed, commercial or recreational​ in the foreseeable future.

Sent from my XT1064 using Tapatalk
Do u know why Uber chose Pittsburgh? What is traffic like there? How is the city center laid out? Have there been any collision incidents reported there with tje self driving car? I bet Uber cant wait for their driverless cars to serve more cities. Based on their model, they can do away with the pesky legislation that made them leave Austin since there would be no driver, so to speak.

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my mom's '16 prius has TSS, but they smartly/conveniently leave out the best feature (blind spot monitoring) for which you have to pay extra for.

lane departure is annoying, i leave it off everytime i drive it, and if you NEED it..you probably shouldnt be driving anyway.

Best feature? Look up how to properly set your mirrors and you'll never need BSM. By far it's the most annoying feature out there... though I have to admit Infiniti putting the indicators on the inner door panel rather than way out on the mirrors is nicer and less distracting...
 
Best feature? Look up how to properly set your mirrors and you'll never need BSM.

not trying to be a smartass, but im pretty sure it is the most sought after/useful feature, hence the additional cost for it.

not sure what you mean by proper mirror setup, ive got my mirrors the way i like them and i still have a blindspot..as im sure most everyone does.

- just saw your edit. to each their own. i could see it being slightly annoying, but the usefulness outweighs the annoyance imo.
 
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not trying to be a smartass, but im pretty sure it is the most sought after/useful feature, hence the additional cost for it.

not sure what you mean by proper mirror setup, ive got my mirrors the way i like them and i still have a blindspot..as im sure most everyone does.

- just saw your edit. to each their own. i could see it being slightly annoying, but the usefulness outweighs the annoyance imo.

BSM is also finicky, distracting, annoying, and easily expensive to fix when it will go bad. Tacomas seem to be the most sensitive to being thrown out of calibration (it'll be about 2hrs of labor to calibrate them when they go bad ontop of diagnostics, I'm just waiting for warranty to run out on people's cars to listen to them balk on repair costs for these systems, auto-hatch struts are easily 1k each on the Rav4 and Highlanders). If you need a blinking light to distract you and pull your attention away from the road to tell you what your mirrors can easily do, you're not focusing on driving properly and your mirrors are set up wrong.

http://www.cartalk.com/sites/default/files/features/mirrors/CarTalkMirrors.pdf

The above is a great way to adjust your mirrors to minimize your blindspots to an almost non-issue. I have never had an issue with blindspots using the above concept, even in vehicles as large as a full-sized 2500 series truck.
 
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