Sarmun

I've been on a first road trip, and had a chance to play much more with autonomous driving features of the car, and here are some thoughts after the trip:

- adaptive cruise control is awesome. When turned on, I was able to completely rely on cruise control on the highway - no matter how much traffic there is, and not touch the gas/break for extended periods, while just steering, making it much more enjoyable to go through LA traffic. It takes some time to get used to it and trust it enough (suggest trying with higher distance first, and then decreasing as you like), but it made the trip much more enjoyable. Following distance can be tweaked from car not being able to get in between (unless other guy is crazy), to being quite a while behind for it to break before you start stressing. There is something to be desired though - first it seems to be targeting to match the distance, not speed of the car in front - if car in front is going much slower, it will go fast until it is around the set distance, and then break aggressively. It would've been much better if it was programmed with much more concern for the smoothness of the ride. Also, if there is suddenly a full stop on the highway - I am not sure if it would be able to break on it's own - every time I gave it few seconds more then when I would start breaking, but I didn't have ***** to let it completely - and I braked before it every single time. Overall, only thing you need to worry about is bikers, keeping eye for people switching lanes, and abrupt full stops.

- lane keeping assist performs much worse - tried to let it control the vehicle on the open road without much traffic, and sometimes it steers nicely, sometimes it lets the car step over the lane markings. Sometimes it seems like it turns off temporarily by itself (on the dashboard wheel goes from green to white). Additionally, in stop&go traffic, if the car in front starts switching lanes, it will try to follow it, getting to the edge of the lane. Overall, it might be useful as an aid, so you don't do anything stupid, but you basically have to steer for yourself.

- from safety - steering wheel vibrates (most of the time) when you step on the line without turn signals. Couple of times, when a car in front abruptly started stopping and turning, without previously giving a turn signal, it beeped right when I was about to hit the break, and it never got a chance to break on it's own

- I am not sure what active LED and adaptive high-beams should be doing. When turned on, if there is no car in front (I suppose no external light cameras can see), it turns on high-beams, in all other situations it puts low beams. As soon as any car appears, it turns off high beams, hopefully not affecting them at all. And that was the only difference I was clearly able to see. Steering might be changing the angles of the lights, but nothing drastically that is obviously visible. Not sure if it should even do that, but I was expecting it to have intermediary states between low-beams and high-beams, depending on how far the other cars are. Anyways, high-beams lit everything extremely well, I am not sure I am really satisfied with the how much low-beams light up the road.

Merlin1

ManiacGT

What I'd like to know more about, as per the OP's subject line, is the lightning package. Now that sounds like a package worth having!

miketc

Lighting fuctionality is different between US and EU due to regulations. The States do not have functions such as active light, cornering light, Motorway mode, Extended range foglamps. Don't know if we have the Adaptive Highbeam Assist Plus in the States or not. The only thing I could tell is the highbeams will come on when there are no cars in front of you. Others may have better insights to the States' features.

Sarmun

@ManiacGT - anything concrete you would like to know?

Lightening package definitely looks great - it really improves how front looks on the car.

In the US, package contains:
Active full-LED headlamps and LED taillamps
Adaptive Highbeam Assist
Active Curve Illumination

It says: "Active Curve Illumination and Adaptive Highbeam Assist continuously vary the beam pattern of the 50 LEDs in each headlamp to help maximize the illumination of corners and straightaways, without creating glare for other drivers"

As I said - the only thing they were actively doing that I was able to notice from about an hour driving on a night curvy road, is that if there is any source of light in front (no matter how small), lights would be in low beam. If it is fully dark in front, they would go into high beam. It takes them less then a second to turn off when a car appears, and are pretty fast to turn back on (few seconds), after the car passes.
Note that we don't get "Adaptive Highbeam Assist Plus" - which partially covers the other car.
As shown on the pictures, low beams are shorter on the driver side, then they are on the passenger side.

ManiacGT

Sorry it's a play on words... I was being sarcastic ;(

Lighting package (ie lights)
And
Lightining/lightening package (aka similar spelling to lightning as in from a storm)

Sadly the joke has passed lol

Sarmun

Ah - missed that - english is not my first language, as you can see. That would really be a cool package

jolt8631

Sarmun - don't worry,.... English IS my first language and I had to read it 3 times before I Spotted it!