Ycore

Yeah, I can see that being the case use for it, but the irony of using it as an active ongoing safety measure rather than a means of convenience means you're basically fighting with the wheel 90% of the time in the hopes it saves you in the rare event that you nod off at the wheel or something. In active use it adds a constant feeling of resistance in the wheel which I find aggravating.

In practice I find that I turn this on in the very rare instance where I have to take my hands off the wheel for 5 seconds or so-- like some super urgent message on my phone.

IMHO the best and most useful of these safety features is the rear cross traffic sensor. Takes the horror of having to blindly back out of a parking spot where your view is obscured by some massive SUV parked next to you.

superswiss

A fair number of folks seem to be under the incorrect impression that lane assist is the same as active autonomous steering. It is not at all. Lane assist's sole purpose is to prevent the car from crossing the lane markings and help the driver steer it back into the lane. Audi's implementation is misleading, because depending on the sensitivity setting it starts to steer the car away from the lane markings before you even hit, so it feels like it's meant to auto steer the car, but it's really not.

Competitors like Mercedes, Tesla and others have true active steering systems in addition to lane keep assist. The active steering assist systems as opposed to lane keep assist are designed to actually steer the car actively using the cameras to monitor the traffic and cars around, not just the lane markings, and automatically evade other cars and follow the road and traffic. That's for example how it works in my C63S. Lane keep assist and active steering are two separate functions that can be independently turned on/off. The lane keep assist simply acts as a safety net and uses the brakes to nudge the car back into the lane if it's about to cross the lane markings, but active steering actually steers the car autonomously for up to 30 seconds and then first visually alerts the driver to touch the steering wheel (BTW, the steering wheel has touch sensors, so you don't have to wiggle it like in Audis) and only if the driver doesn't take over even after the visual warning does it start to warn audibly and if the driver still doesn't take over it brings the car to a full stop and automatically calls emergency services. Audi's lane assist does nothing like that. First of all it warns annoyingly after only a few seconds, which is understandable, because as said, it's not an active steering system and if the driver doesn't take over, it simply deactivates.

Same issue extends to traffic jam assist. I fully agree that Audi's implementation is garbage. I've said this before. TJA works somewhat OK until you come to a fully stop as you said and unless traffic starts moving again within 3 seconds it just deactivates. Again, the same system in my C63S stays active for 30 seconds and starts moving off on its own. It's actually smart to recognize the road and the traffic situation. On divided highways it remains active for the aforementioned 30 seconds, but on surface roads it deactivates after 3 seconds similar to Audi for safety reasons. I never really use the system on surfaces roads unless I find myself in really bad city traffic, so the short duration isn't much of an issue. The MB system is super useful in highway stop&go traffic and for the most part the driver can sit back and relax and just let the car do the stop&go driving. The leader in this space is obviously Tesla, which now even recognizes traffic lights and automatically brings the car to a stop and resumes again if the lights turn green. They are moving closer and closer to actual self-driving if that's something you are interested in.

paradyne

This must be set differently on US models, it is more like 15 seconds on mine so unless I come to a stop just as a light has turned red and have to wait, it will drive off again.

I suspect the experience with the lane keeping varies a lot with the roads, where I live it works quite well. I could imagine that with wider lanes in the US it doesn't?

MH62

Hum, I wonder if we could bump up this number via coding.

Ycore

It is different between Euro and US. Whether that's due to some safety regulation or some other reasoning I have no clue. I was told it has something to do with avoiding a situation where someone walks in front of your stopped vehicle and risks getting hit,. so it forces you to re-enable the system if you come to a complete stop for more than a few seconds.

superswiss

It works OK, but not great. I would best describe Audi's system as robotic. It often feels like a slightly inebriated driver with diminished reflexes. It tends to ping pong left to right in traffic as well as on open roads, and ACC often acts like it just woke up and realized that the car in front is actually slowing down. ACC in particular acts like a bad driver who only focuses on the immediate car ahead instead of looking farther down the road to see in advance if traffic slows down. This is not surprising, because Audi only uses the radar sensor and it can only see the immediate car ahead of it and more narrow roads may somewhat reduce the left/right ping pong effect. I actually felt a bit embarrassed using Audi's system, because I felt it made me look like a bad driver. One of the immediate things I noticed the first time I tried the Mercedes' system is that it acts much more naturally like a human driver. It was very apparent to me, and after doing some research I found out that Mercedes' ACC system (DISTRONIC) uses the cameras to look ahead and assess the traffic in addition to the radar sensor monitor the car immediately ahead. This leads to a more natural human like deceleration in advance as the traffic slows down ahead, instead of the more panic like slow down of Audi's ACC once the driver ahead wakes up and realizes they need to slow down. Basically, the issue with Audis system is that it adopts the bad habits of the driver ahead. If the driver ahead is properly looking down the road and starts easing of the throttle in anticipation that they may need to stop, then Audi's ACC follows that behavior and all is good, but as so often is the case here in the USA, most drivers on the road are terrible and don't pay attention, so if the car ahead stops abruptly, then ACC needs to panic and stop. I can see how in Europe, it might work a lot better simply because of the much better road discipline of other drivers.

eman006

Agree with superswiss' previous post. My wife's Volvo ACC seems less "jerky" than my Audi. However, IMO, Audi's ACC is better than no ACC at all.

garberfc

I agree, it's better than nothing and I use it most all the time. It's much better than the old cruise control technology. It certainly has its faults or shortcomings, but once you become aware of them you'll learn to work with and around them.

I think in Audi's case, well also like everyone else, they're learning as they go. They're including the technology in these cars like an experiment and improving and refining it with each iteration. The sad / maddening part is that we're paying the price of the learning curve.

superswiss

That would be OK, if they contentiously updated it for existing owners like Tesla does. The first versions of Autopilot were pretty bad, but Tesla pushes out incremental updates to make the system better and better for existing owners.