Jim Farley testing BlueCruise 1.4 in Lighting

[azerik]

Why would they be on the hook? The SUMA ones still have all BLIS functionality...

3rd party chip for BLIS. How quick is any manufacture to blame an aftermartket part.

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[GreaseMonkey]

Judging by how the car cuts off merging traffic, I don’t want it to change lanes. That is the most dangerous aspect of BC1.0.

 

[ShawnMakie]

I saw a couple previous comments mentioning "automated lane changes" (without driver initiation).

What would the usecase be to have your car switch lanes on its own without the driver first indicating a Lane change is desired?

Is this specific to the desire to have BC follow a planned route/navigation? Otherwise, I'd be pretty irritated if the car just decided on it's own it didn't want to be in the lane I put it in for whatever other reason.

 

[samev]

also to switch to a less clogged adjacent lane for example

 

[ChuckA]

Makes $800(or more) a year disappear from your bank account.

My thoughts exactly. Flawlessly.

 

[Neil4Real]

I saw a couple previous comments mentioning "automated lane changes" (without driver initiation).

What would the usecase be to have your car switch lanes on its own without the driver first indicating a Lane change is desired?

Is this specific to the desire to have BC follow a planned route/navigation? Otherwise, I'd be pretty irritated if the car just decided on it's own it didn't want to be in the lane I put it in for whatever other reason.

I believe the intent is to go around slow cars, like follows: You set cruise control to 70, you catch up to the car in front of you that is going slower than your set speed. The car checks the lane(s) next to you and determines it is clear and changes lanes to get you back to your set speed.

I believe SuperCruise has the no input lane change, but I thought it popups and asks if you want it to change lanes and you have to hit okay or maybe it defaults to okay and you can hit no. Either way, I think it is pretty cool and I'm sure will be super cautious.

 

[azerik]

The automatic lane change coupled with speed sign recognition and a 20mph over speed limit sign target will be a whole slew of posts if this ever comes to be.

 

[ShawnMakie]

I believe the intent is to go around slow cars, like follows: You set cruise control to 70, you catch up to the car in front of you that is going slower than your set speed. The car checks the lane(s) next to you and determines it is clear and changes lanes to get you back to your set speed.

This sounds like a cool idea conceptually, but gosh the specific rare conditions where I'd be comfortable letting the car make that decision wouldn't be worth enabling the feature to me.

Or maybe I just need to see it in action to gain some confidence.

At any rate, BC can't even consistently stay enabled going straight on i70 - it's a big leap for me to trust it to do automated lane changes.

 

[Mirak]

What would the usecase be to have your car switch lanes on its own without the driver first indicating a Lane change is desired?

Is this specific to the desire to have BC follow a planned route/navigation?

Yes. It’s the next (small) step in more autonomous driving. In and of itself, there’s not a huge amount of utility to it since you’ve gotta stay focused on the road anyway. But it would be kinda cool. That’s about it for now.

 

[Mirak]

Considering BC 1.x is using EyeQ4 from 2018, I sure hope they'll move on to a newer platform for BC2. MobileEye already has two newer platforms released since EyeQ4.

Hardware capabilities (if you can trust wikipedia) for what we have are:

• 3D Vehicles,
• Next-Gen Lane Markings
• Road Markings
• Traffic Lights
• Relevance of Traffic Lights
• Next-Gen Semantic Free Space
• Road Profile
• General Objects
• Hazards
• Animals
• Path Prediction
• Road Edges

There could be limitations based on what sensors Ford included. There are also two hardware levels for EyeQ4. My speculation with the reasoning they gave of delaying 1.2 on 21 and 22 models is that 21 and 22 might have the mid tier hardware and 23+ might have the high tier hardware (more processing power).

The MobileEye tech is really ingenious stuff. And it’s the guts of “BlueCruise.” Some of Ford’s additions - the graphic interface and the eye nanny - are really just window dressing by comparison. I suspect many of the performance enhancements with 1.3 are just Ford loosening up their self-imposed restraints on the MobileEye tech. But it’s neat to see how far this can go.

 

[peterlhansen]

Hopefully BC would follow navigation if a destination is set as well!

And, it would be nice if CarPlay could pass the route to BlueCruise

 

[YunniorO]

I’d be shocked if BC - with current hardware - is enhanced to:

• do automatic lane changes
• otherwise steer the car (such as onto an off-ramp) based upon navigation

I’m guessing it may just be further loosening of the hands-on constraints on curves, better performance at on-and off-ramps, and other relatively minor enhancements.

I’d love to see a more robust graphical depiction on the IPC of objects around the car, a la Tesla, but I’m not sure Ford has the software chops for that.

They absolutely could give us a graphical depiction.

 

[Jimrpa]

The fact that Ford hasn't changed this yet boggles my mind. I've complained directly to people there and was told:

"Hi Todd, Thank you for voicing your concerns. Your feedback will help continuously improve our products. I’ve forwarded your note to the right team and I’ll circle back." blah blah blah

There's been a number of studies conducted on vehicle purchases. Technology and it's design is ranked very high among consumers in the under 50 age bracket. Many studies cite the fatigue and frustration from these buyers in regards to poor technological advances. Legacy auto makers struggle with these things for sure, but changing icons should be easy. Heck, go back to the original icons!

That’s because, as engineers, they’ve spent their life in a Windoze environment. They don’t know any better. They should all be handed MacBooks so they can see what halfway decent UI design looks like. Also, they should look at some real UI standards, and develop their own modern UI standards.
Note: I’m not proposing that they “Apple-fy “ the UI, and I know Apple’s UI has flaws, but at least it’s pretty consistent and has a set of guidelines.

 

[Jimrpa]

Why would they be on the hook? The SUMA ones still have all BLIS functionality...

The BLIS indicators are in the mirrors, but the BLIS radar units are not. They’re someplace around the rear quarter panels.

 

[Mirak]

They absolutely could give us a graphical depiction.

That’s cool, but that car Is a specially modified Ford with 12 cameras.

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