Text/Wang Xinxi
Recently, a car owner in Shaoxing can not cancel the cruise at a fixed speed, with a speed of 120 yards per hour, high-speed racing 100 kilometers, after receiving the alarm, the traffic police quickly dispatched, to reduce social vehicles, close the high-speed toll station, to ensure that the vehicle driven by the man can safely slow down and finally stop.
This incident has once again sparked people's thinking about the safety of cruise control. For example, in 2018, the Mercedes-Benz C200 cruise control incident, and earlier this year, an off-road vehicle cruise control system failed, causing the vehicle to "run" on the road at a speed of about 110 yards, unable to slow down and stop, this process lasted 5 hours and traveled more than 500 kilometers.
In fact, with the development of intelligent driving to this day, it is time to eliminate cruise control.
Cruise control, why don't many people use it?
The function of the cruise control system is to automatically keep the vehicle moving at a fixed speed without having to press the accelerator pedal. Under normal circumstances, the driver presses the brake pedal, presses the accelerator or shifts the gear back to neutral, and the cruise control will be automatically disengaged.
But from the perspective of various accidents, the possibility of cruise control failure and unrelieved still exists, and once an accident occurs, it is a major accident.
Under normal circumstances, this function has a certain effect on car owners who often run at high speeds, and now the cruise control function has also been added to electric vehicles.
Cruise control only does one thing, is to help you step on the accelerator to control the speed, once there is a problem, it is your driver's responsibility, you look at this section of the road when it is safe, and cancel it if it is not safe.
The premise of any driver driving a fixed speed is that the road conditions allow, and the cruise speed will also be fixed when it is not allowed. Therefore, cruise control cannot actually bring enough sense of security to car owners.
Fixed-speed cruise can adapt to the road section is too little, first of all, the urban road is basically not used, in the urban area, many people have more cars in the road section, the general car speed is less than 40km/h, the cruise speed is not working, in the urban area of the elevated, expressway driving, when there are few cars can also be used, but in the urban road, when the most used on and off work, the traffic flow is large, and there is no use of the conditions.
When driving on the highway for a long time, cruise control can be started under certain conditions. However, when encountering traffic jams and speed limit changes, the road section is not so easy to use. Sometimes there is a ramp, and some 4 lanes become 3 lanes, and 3 lanes become 2 lanes, so you need to concentrate and not slack off.
In fact, it only saves you one foot of stepping on the accelerator, and the fatigue of long-distance driving can be solved by one foot relaxed? Only some old heavy-duty vehicles are difficult to step on the accelerator, and the vast majority of cars, the tiredness of stepping on the accelerator is actually not tired, and the so-called tiredness is almost all brought by long-term sitting + compression of the lower limbs.
Therefore, cruise control does not bring a better experience, but it brings greater safety risks and uncertainties.
Even if not from the point of view of trigger conditions and failures, cruise control is easy to make people sleepy, after all, driving on the highway, cruise at a fixed speed as soon as you open, your feet don't care, the high-speed scenery is single, and you can drive in a relatively stable, comfortable and single environment for a long time, hypnosis often occurs, and it is easier to get tired, and the driver is sleepy when driving, and the control of the steering wheel is not so accurate, and sometimes it is easy to deviate from the lane and there is danger.
Therefore, most car owners are reluctant to use cruise control because they feel that it is unreliable and impractical.
The ability to drive intelligently is getting stronger and stronger, but it retains the fixed-speed cruise with poor safety, which is a contradiction
From the perspective of the development of new energy vehicles, an important direction is intelligence, and now the intelligent assisted driving ability is getting stronger and stronger, but it retains the cruise control, isn't it a contradiction?
After all, in the development of new energy vehicles, intelligent driving ability is an important competitiveness compared with oil vehicles. According to the classification of automatic driving, L1 is the lowest level of automatic driving, while cruise control can barely be regarded as L1, and the real L1 is adaptive cruise. At present, most of the intelligent assisted driving of domestic new energy is at the L2 level.
To put it simply, cruise control is actually an outdated technology, and the standard configuration of more vehicles is adaptive cruise, adaptive cruise is a very low-end automatic driving that does not help steering, but it has the characteristics of automatic driving, and cruise control does not.
Judging from the momentum of today's intelligent driving development, it is time for cruise control to be eliminated.
As mentioned earlier, "cruise control can free the right foot without having to step on the accelerator all the time, which can alleviate driving fatigue to a certain extent." However, not pressing the accelerator for a long time may increase the likelihood that the driver will feel sluggish. ”
In addition, the complexity of road conditions determines the logic of cruise control, such as straight roads and corners, undulating sections and gentle road sections, the speed required by vehicles is not the same, and forcing the same speed to pass through different road conditions is unscientific in itself and is more likely to cause problems.
As for the cruise control can not be lifted, this kind of news appears from time to time, excluding novice operation errors, when the vehicle leaves the factory, whether the logic of braking priority is ensured, there are also doubts.
Some netizens said that this function is not dared to try at all in daily life, if the driver does not dare to try, and cannot ensure whether it can be turned off normally, then what is the role of this function?
Unsafe cruise control, it's time to get rid of it
Therefore, for ordinary car owners, there is no complete trust in the function of cruise control, it is likely to be a convenient function for you to make mistakes.
In the case of the tram carrying the pressure of battery life, the manufacturer does not recommend the use of fixed-speed cruise, and even NIO once gave a "power-saving cheat", saying that it is best not to use fixed-speed cruise, because of the cost of electricity.
Now the development of new energy vehicles, the intelligent function of the vehicle is increasing, and the automatic driving ability is from L2 to L3 level of transition, the current news is that the M9 has been applying for L3 level automatic driving, or will be the world's first passenger car to apply for L3 level automatic driving on the viaduct of the highway.
Level 1 autonomous driving is to free your feet, and in the past, when I turned on cruise control at high speeds, it was basically L1.
L2 level autonomous driving is to free your hands, your hands can occasionally leave the steering wheel, but you need to be ready to take over the vehicle at any time, and now most of the new forces on the market, such as Tesla, Wei Xiaoli, and Wenjie M7, are all L2. And if it develops to L3 level of automatic driving, you can completely free your hands at high speeds, and the accident is borne by the manufacturer.
In the past, new energy bigwigs have been emphasizing the intelligence of electric cars, and Tesla, Wei Xiaoli, AVATAR, BMW Mercedes-Benz and a large number of joint ventures are all promoting their own intelligent driving technology at a high level. However, at the moment when autonomous driving is about to develop to the L3 level, while retaining the low-level intelligent function setting of cruise control, it is a contradiction in itself.
On the other hand, in the new energy era, the failure rate of fixed-speed cycles may increase. We know that the automatic driving system and the assisted driving system include the three major systems of perception, decision-making and control, and problems in any of them may cause cruise control failures.
At a time when the development direction of autonomous driving is leaping towards L3, the uncertain failure of cruise control will also be caused by problems in the assisted driving system, which also tests the safety and reliability of new energy vehicles.
From this point of view, it is time for the function of cruise control to be eliminated. For users, life safety is above all else, they can drive by themselves, or try not to give their lives to the algorithm, technology will eventually have omissions, no matter how advanced the algorithm is, it is not as good as the human brain.
For car companies, how to replace cruise control with a safer intelligent control system, and put the elimination of cruise control on the strategic agenda, is a need for car companies to think. While improving the intelligent experience, car companies cannot ignore safety, which is the foundation of their lives. This task may have to be handed over to the new energy vehicle company bosses.
Author: Wang Xinxi, Senior Reviewer of TMT This article is not reproduced without permission