Demosthenes
Active Member
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2022
- Messages
- 954
Just wanted to chip in my thoughts on how I’ve experienced HA evolve since it was introduced. I tend to use a lot of ACC and HA due to my regular drives back and forth from San Diego to Vancouver, Canada - round trip of roughly 2800 miles. For this particular use, I’m 99% on ACC (in the early days) then HA after it was introduced. I forget exactly which update that HA was (version 2? Or was that CarPlay and HA came before version 2 
).
Whatever the case, when HA was first introduced it was an absolute sea change over ACC for a 2800 mile road trip (not just an enhancement of robustness however robust those enhancements may have been). But I do recall those early HA days were still marked by a suboptimal ability to maintain the lane in the face of moderate curvature and moderate speed (really started to noticeably degrade around 75ish) as well as fairly common areas of ‘dropout’ where HA just went inexplicably absent (and not just because the road may or may not have been mapped yet for HA, but along the lines of HA working perfectly fine for a few minutes and then disappearing for a few minutes and then reactivating and so on and so forth all within a few miles of uninterrupted major interstate). Couple that with the state of nav at that time with its absurdly inaccurate (and fixed) range estimates when plotting long distance charging routes, it still did feel somewhat like a Brave New World every time I had to combine those dissonant elements together on yet another long road trip.
Fortunately, through the much appreciated diligent and continued efforts of the lucid software team in combination with what I can only assume were the collectively loud voices of our community here, both nav and HA continued to significantly improve up to maybe around 2.1.33/34. At that point, random dropouts were all but gone and the range estimates somehow became mostly superb. Now I could just enter a start and end location, activate HA, set my hand to auto-stir the steering wheel every few minutes, kick my feet back, run some massage, pop in a movie and enjoyably get from point A to B without much fuss or surprise. Lane keeping still struggled a bit at higher speeds and bendy roads but it was very manageable.
But with 2.1.42, HA seemed to break a bit. In my experience, it just couldn’t reliably keep a lane anymore sometimes even a wide straight one with clear skies and no traffic. This meant that regrettably my movies had to be tucked away, the shoe had to be reinstated onto my pedal foot, and my vision had to return once more to the road. Yes, I had to drive. Luckily, since it’s a lucid air, driving is just as enjoyable and arguably more, so no harm done
I’ve finally had a chance to put significant miles into HA under the latest 2.1.47 update and I’m really pleased to see that not only is the lane keeping backslide completely rectified but it’s now much better than even its peak level previously. Now in order to fling it off course, I find I have to be closer to 80 and the curves have to be almost sharp. It still doesn’t control its motion path as gradually and smoothly as I would prefer when faced with a tough curve at speed. However, if I’m able to white knuckle it to the last second before intervening, HA now will keep the lane before I have to step in. The previous lane keep would have invariably blithely sent me to my doom under those circumstances previously.
Unfortunately, this report isn’t entirely positive. The problem of drop out of HA may have come back similar to before. And that’s something that really detriments the experience cuz it means being forced to go back to ACC…like an animal. I wonder if a sensor or two was just clouded by fog or moisture or darkness which explains the drop out and it’s not an HA issue per se. Because if that one issue is either imaginary or gets fixed, then HA will be perfectly sufficient for me - until if and when we get some working version of FSD.
TLDR? Basically I feel the recent iterations of HA have been of the two steps forward, one step back variety but overall still moving in the right direction!
).Whatever the case, when HA was first introduced it was an absolute sea change over ACC for a 2800 mile road trip (not just an enhancement of robustness however robust those enhancements may have been). But I do recall those early HA days were still marked by a suboptimal ability to maintain the lane in the face of moderate curvature and moderate speed (really started to noticeably degrade around 75ish) as well as fairly common areas of ‘dropout’ where HA just went inexplicably absent (and not just because the road may or may not have been mapped yet for HA, but along the lines of HA working perfectly fine for a few minutes and then disappearing for a few minutes and then reactivating and so on and so forth all within a few miles of uninterrupted major interstate). Couple that with the state of nav at that time with its absurdly inaccurate (and fixed) range estimates when plotting long distance charging routes, it still did feel somewhat like a Brave New World every time I had to combine those dissonant elements together on yet another long road trip.
Fortunately, through the much appreciated diligent and continued efforts of the lucid software team in combination with what I can only assume were the collectively loud voices of our community here, both nav and HA continued to significantly improve up to maybe around 2.1.33/34. At that point, random dropouts were all but gone and the range estimates somehow became mostly superb. Now I could just enter a start and end location, activate HA, set my hand to auto-stir the steering wheel every few minutes, kick my feet back, run some massage, pop in a movie and enjoyably get from point A to B without much fuss or surprise. Lane keeping still struggled a bit at higher speeds and bendy roads but it was very manageable.
But with 2.1.42, HA seemed to break a bit. In my experience, it just couldn’t reliably keep a lane anymore sometimes even a wide straight one with clear skies and no traffic. This meant that regrettably my movies had to be tucked away, the shoe had to be reinstated onto my pedal foot, and my vision had to return once more to the road. Yes, I had to drive. Luckily, since it’s a lucid air, driving is just as enjoyable and arguably more, so no harm done
I’ve finally had a chance to put significant miles into HA under the latest 2.1.47 update and I’m really pleased to see that not only is the lane keeping backslide completely rectified but it’s now much better than even its peak level previously. Now in order to fling it off course, I find I have to be closer to 80 and the curves have to be almost sharp. It still doesn’t control its motion path as gradually and smoothly as I would prefer when faced with a tough curve at speed. However, if I’m able to white knuckle it to the last second before intervening, HA now will keep the lane before I have to step in. The previous lane keep would have invariably blithely sent me to my doom under those circumstances previously.
Unfortunately, this report isn’t entirely positive. The problem of drop out of HA may have come back similar to before. And that’s something that really detriments the experience cuz it means being forced to go back to ACC…like an animal. I wonder if a sensor or two was just clouded by fog or moisture or darkness which explains the drop out and it’s not an HA issue per se
. Because if that one issue is either imaginary or gets fixed, then HA will be perfectly sufficient for me - until if and when we get some working version of FSD.TLDR? Basically I feel the recent iterations of HA have been of the two steps forward, one step back variety but overall still moving in the right direction!
