My Assessment of BlueCruise

[Mach1E]

Sorry if I missed this here or elsewhere else. If we don't like BC can you just use lane centering and hand nanny? Not sure if you call it ICC or CP360. TIA

You just keep your hands on the wheel.

Can’t turn the eye nanny off, but unless you’re planning on not watching the road for some reason it’s no big deal.

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[phil]

And if you don’t treat it like a toy or parlor trick, it’ll work great for what it is.

I say it is a toy. It's not a driver's aid, it's more a driver's annoyance. And it's certainly not a safety feature, or a remotely safe system for automated driving.

If you treat it like a toy, it's a fun toy. But never trust it with your life.

 

[Mach1E]

I say it is a toy. It's not a driver's aid, it's more a driver's annoyance. And it's certainly not a safety feature, or a remotely safe system for automated driving.

If you treat it like a toy, it's a fun toy. But never trust it with your life.

Just like with ICC (and crash avoidance and all the other stuff) it’s intent is to assist drivers and possibly see something before the driver does.

You seem to be implying that it isn’t safe or that it’s less safe using it. Any reason/data for this belief? Or is it more of a general mistrust of these types of features?

 

[phil]

You seem to be implying that it isn’t safe or that it’s less safe using it. Any reason/data for this belief? Or is it more of a general mistrust of these types of features?

Both. I've used it some, and it often disengages with zero warning, either saying "Canceled" or just "Hands on Wheel". Several of these times, it has immediately sailed out of the lane, requiring lightning-quick driver intervention. It works well most of the time, maybe 98% or 99% of the time, which is not nearly enough for safety.

I am confident that, one day, computer-driven cars will be very safe. I am also confident that day is not today. For now, BC is a cool system, but if you are not gripping the wheel, you need to be super-alert for disengagements and errors, which prevents any relaxation that could theoretically be a benefit of the system.

YMMV, but I don't think it's either safe or relaxing. I hope everyone who uses it is careful, and stays safe.

 

[Old Guy]

I have no intention of using it.

 

[Jimrpa]

Agreed but there are defined limits of curves at a given speed allowed for Interstate highways. That should be the target and what we should expect.

In an ideal world, I agree. I just don’t think Ford is there yet. My suspicion is that they have the tolerances set very tight to avoid too many videos of Mustang Mach Es chasing bollards (like another auto maker’s ADAS seems to want to do).

 

[Dr Obnxs]

I'm a Job 1. Mines in at service getting the TSB for stuck at 1.7.1 done and BlueCruise is being enabled as well I think. I live in the SF Bay Area that's heavily mapped. I'll play around and report back.

The path to autonomous driving is kind of screwy. Everything up to full autonomy make the driver less engaged yet still needing to quickly respond. It's far from ideal.

My anticipation is that I'll only really use this for longer trips. Heck, I turn off lane centering for normal driving. I find it's feedback unsettling. I also live in hills and many of the turns are much more manageable when you clip an apex or two and sometimes kiss the bots dots. Lane centering just gets in the way.

Anyway, it's probably so conservative as to be annoying. But I'm anticipating it getting better over time. We're effectively FORD beta testers on this.

 

[Mirak]

BC handled the curves on my 2hr drive along I-35 much better than my first test on other roads. It only required hands a few times. Still very weird where it requires hands.

Another note: the BC driver’s screen design is very pretty and seamless. High marks on the interface design.

 

[ChasingCoral]

In an ideal world, I agree. I just don’t think Ford is there yet. My suspicion is that they have the tolerances set very tight to avoid too many videos of Mustang Mach Es chasing bollards (like another auto maker’s ADAS seems to want to do).

Agreed. Not there yet but we’re should expect it to get there.

 

[RobbertPatrison]

Here is my impression of BlueCruise after ~300 miles of using it:

• It does a pretty good job at keeping distance and smoothly adapting speed to the car in front.
• It is cool that it automatically adjust to the posted speed limit.
• The lane centering is awkward and unintuitive when other traffic is present. It often steers too close to cars on the sides (probably because it doesn’t see them at all). As a human driver you steer away to the other side a little to keep distance.
• It does not anticipate curves well, steering too late and then over-correcting.
• It switches from hands-off to hands-on-wheel constantly, for no reason and without audible warning. Since it keeps lane-centering it didn’t lose the road, so why is it pestering me? To add to that: It is picky about keeping the hands on wheel: it wants 2 firm hands.
• Bluecruise also turns on when driving on local 35mph roads, not just highways. It seems to be performing worse there due to poorly visible lines on the road.

After all the the hype I am a bit disappointed by Blue Cruise, it is just glorified lane centering. Not something I would pay a monthly fee for.

 

[Mirak]

Here is my impression of BlueCruise after ~300 miles of using it:

• It does a pretty good job at keeping distance and smoothly adapting speed to the car in front.
• It is cool that it automatically adjust to the posted speed limit.
• The lane centering is awkward and unintuitive when other traffic is present. It often steers too close to cars on the sides (probably because it doesn’t see them at all). As a human driver you steer away to the other side a little to keep distance.
• It does not anticipate curves well, steering too late and then over-correcting.
• It switches from hands-off to hands-on-wheel constantly, for no reason and without audible warning. Since it keeps lane-centering it didn’t lose the road, so why is it pestering me? To add to that: It is picky about keeping the hands on wheel: it wants 2 firm hands.
• Bluecruise also turns on when driving on local 35mph roads, not just highways. It seems to be performing worse there due to poorly visible lines on the road.

After all the the hype I am a bit disappointed by Blue Cruise, it is just glorified lane centering. Not something I would pay a monthly fee for.

Everything you wrote except the part I bold underlined is just the standard CoPilot360 suite of driver assistance features. The only thing BlueCruise adds is the hands-free bit. A lot of people (probably who had BlueCruise enabled from the start) don’t understand this.

That might seem like semantics, but you can get all these features for free once your BlueCruise subscription expires. Your subscription (already rolled into the increased price of the car) will expire in three years if the car came with BC pre-installed. For those of us early adopters who bought 2021 Job 1 cars without BC pre-installed, Ford is giving us a one-year trial subscription.

Also, you don’t have BC on local roads. What you are seeing is the standard CP360 “BB8 Bubble.” It’s only BC when the whole screen goes blue and you see the Hands Free wheel symbol. What May have you confused is sometimes you’ll get a pop up saying “BlueCruise is active” or some such message while on local roads. It isn’t. That’s a bug I’ve noticed.

 

[Mirak]

Agree.

Now that I digest that, though I think it makes sense. I bet the system is designed to allow only a certain amount of torque against the power steering motor before the nanny aborts. Those curves must be on the border line of the limit, and some days say when there is a slight cross wind or perhaps groove variation in the lane it aborts.

That is a very interesting point and I bet it’s true. So on these borderline curves, a lot of factors could come into play like cross winds, speed, paving, etc. That’s actually pretty sophisticated, but I think Ford needs to loosen up the parameters.

 

[Ztug]

After my OTAs stalled out on 2.4.2 over a week ago, I got approval to have the dealership install the BlueCruise update yesterday. So I think that makes me one of maybe a few dozen Job 1 2021s that actually narrowly got BlueCruise by the end of Q1 2021, though not OTA. And about 9mos late as originally scheduled, but I digress. What you guys want to know is how it works.

Well, first, be aware it may not work at all for the first 12-24 hours! Even though I had it toggled on under the driver assistance settings (it’s called “hands free”) and I checked my ford.com vehicle dashboard to ensure BlueCruise was activated (under Connected Services), it didn’t work for me last night. Customer Service was worthless, as per usual. They suggested I wasn’t on an eligible road. When I asked them to verify based upon my location, they said they couldn’t do that because they don’t actually have a map of the Blue Zones. One is supposed to be coming. In May. Dammit Ford, stop being so bad at this. Please.

But anyway, today it worked. I took it on about a 25 mile loop of a few connecting highways around and through Wichita. It generally works fine. I had no issues on the straight stretches - no ping ponging - and it also handled most of the mild curves with only mild ping ponging.

In the map below, I’ve highlighted three curves in red which it could not handle. Well, let me be very clear about this - the lane centering could handle these curves just fine, but BlueCruise insisted that I put my hands back on the wheel anyway. And it does not navigate highway interchanges at all. I’m not talking cloverleafs - it cannot even handle gently curving 60mph ramps from one highway to the next.

When BC is operational, the eye nanny is very sensitive. If you look down ever so slightly at the IPC (driver instrument panel cluster), you will get a gentle “Watch the Road” pop up (no chimes) after 5 seconds. If you you look over to the infotainment screen or up to the rearview mirror or off to the side somewhere, you will get a stronger “Watch the Road” (with chimes) after 5 seconds. In either case, if you ignore that warning for 7 seconds you will get a “Resume Control” and louder chimes. I didn’t see what happens after that.

So that’s basically it. My assessment is that BlueCruise is currently very conservative. I can see how this will be a bit more relaxing on long drives (I’ve got a two hour highway trip coming tonight), but at this point I’m not sure I’ll continue past the 1yr free trial unless Ford loosens up on the reigns a bit. I don’t mind the sensitivity of the eye nanny - that part wasn’t the nuisance I feared it would be - but with the amount of times you have to put hands back on the wheel it’s not a massive enhancement over standard CP360.

Let me know if you all have any questions.

My question is, what do I have to do to get it? I have 17,000 miles on my Mustang Mach e rear wheel drive extended battery premium that I bought last April. And still no blue Cruise

 

[Jimrpa]

Agreed. Not there yet but we’re should expect it to get there.

My only concern would be - is the existing hardware on the vehicle sufficient? ?‍

 

[jasn]

Pardon the thread crap, but @Mirak what map is in your OP? I'd love to have the option for the built-in map to change the background to satellite or multi-colors.

As far as the topic, I've used BC on a couple of long highway drives. I like having it, but I'm still on the fence as to whether it really "assists" me or if I'm even more engaged to make sure it's OK or to keep it from telling me to [do something] versus casually driving with one hand, as typical on a highway. I've had it on/off several times because I get a little weary of that new dimension of engagement.

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