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Getting Lane Centering to Work Properly

xtraman122

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Pete
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I got to spend some early morning time in the Hwy 59 express lane this week. This is a single lane with concrete barriers on either side, so you can't veer out of your lane, no risk of crashing into someone else, just into the barrier and messing up your truck. While I was there all alone, I got a little braver with my experiments. It turns out that a 2.5 pound ankle weight at 4:00 is sufficient for hands free driving, but still nags when using your hands. A 24 once fishing weight at 3:00 is sufficient for hands free driving, but still nags when using your hands. My guess is that having my hands on the wheel at 6:00 or 9:00 offsets some of the weights I am hanging at 4:00 or 3:00, thus required more weight to kill the nag screen when driving hands on than it does to kill the nag screen when going hands free. Definitely very frustrating.
What you explained definitely lines up with what I've experienced. The system seems to simply check for resistance when turn to tell whether or not your hands are there. So even if you put a 10lb weight on there, if you counteract that weight perfectly with your hands, it'll likely think nobody is there and chime.

On another note, I had the lane centering get disabled for me for the first time earlier this week. I had heard of this happening to others, but hadn't seen it myself yet. I was driving on the highway, lane centering enabled, and it did the little message saying it was canceled as I was going past an exit. Didn't think much of it, it does it all the time if it thinks it lost sight of the lines etc.

I kept waiting for it to see the lines again and it wouldn't. I disabled/re-enabled cruise, still wouldn't "lock in" to the lines to enable lane centering. Finally I tried turning off the lane centering button and re-enabling that, and that's when it yelled at me with the orange message on the screen saying lane centering wasn't available. Couldn't get it enable again until I turned the truck off and back, and now it's fine again.
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ldsavow

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I seriously need to try the WEIGHT trick..
I HATE the alarm that CONSTANTLY pings at me.
 
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Ajzride

Ajzride

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My first 1200 miles were all on the Houston tollways, this weekend i got another 1000 outside of Houston, so I was able to learn some more things.

Fist the lane centering is exponentially better on asphalt that on concrete. It holds better with less bounding, doesn't ride the center line as much, and predicts curve much more smoothly. I suppose the better contrast for the cameras to pick up the lines helps a bunch.

Secondly, it appears the riding the center stripe is two fold. First as stated blacktops make it much better versus concrete, perhaps it can just see it better to center itself. Secondly I found that it is apply a safety factor and staying away from the yellow line. Typically the yellow line indicates traffic coming at you, so it makes sense to err to the other side, but since 90% of the time you are using lane centering you are on a divided highway, it mans you are crowding someone next to you and leaving the emergency lane and barrier a huge gap. It shouldn't be too hard to teach the system to recognize a divided highway and err towards the barrier/median instead of towards other cars.

I adjusted my steering wheel position to be much much closer to me. In performance driving at the track you have the wheel very close to you to reduce fatigue when working the wheel hard through corners, but on an interstate trip I prefer to stretch out and extend my elbows. Moving the steering wheel much closer though allowed me to put most of the weight of my arms and hands on the armrest, hold the wheel at 8:00 or 4:00, and let the fishing weight make the hands on wheel nanny happy. I can quickly override the lane centering if I don't like it's behavior (like following the outside line onto an exit ramp) because my hands are on the wheel, but since all the weight is on my elbow, I'm not counteracting the fishing weight and I don't get a nag screen.
 
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Ajzride

Ajzride

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I wanted to circle back on this topic and note that after the latest round of software updates (that enabled blue cruise), the lane centering now works properly, just like it does in my Mach E. Now when I'm on a road that is not blue cruise enabled, I can just rest one hand on the wheel and it will not ding to hold the wheel if I have lane centering enabled. Also it doesn't feel like I'm fighting the wheel anymore if I want to adjust it away from one of the lines back to center. I'm pretty sure it was the Power Steering Control Module update that resulted in the fix, but that is packaged with a few others, so it's hard to tell for sure.
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