Forward Collision Warning (FCW) to me Failed - You Opinion Please

Ben&Jen

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Today, we had a lady run a stop sign and the FWC did not activate. We stopped on our own and swerved.

Does this system not work with a vehicle traveling side to side in front of you.

It does work if a car slams on the brakes in front of you, but not if it sees the side of the car.

PS, the other car was fire engine red.

Any comments. I think this is important. Please
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I don't think our FCW has pedestrian detection
 

lightthief

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There are only sensors directly in front of the car. None on the sides or behind you.

You may see something coming in your peripheral vision and react but it only sees straight ahead and can only react once it sees an object in front of you and can determine how quickly you are moving towards it.

To determine this It takes one sample of the object in front of you. And then a second sample and compares the difference between them to calculate.

There likely isn't enough time for it to sense a car or person that appears in front of you essentially spontaneously.

Color of the car is inconsequential.
The visual cameras are essentially only for identifying road lines, which it does with basic contrast comparison between the black roads and white road lines. The system uses something along the lines of radar/lidar to detect objects.
Cameras may also look for something fairly standardized like a license plate as a secondary confirmation a car is in front of you but that's just speculation on my part.

Hope that helps.
 

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Today, we had a lady run a stop sign and the FWC did not activate. We stopped on our own and swerved.

Does this system not work with a vehicle traveling side to side in front of you.

It does work if a car slams on the brakes in front of you, but not if it sees the side of the car.

PS, the other car was fire engine red.

Any comments. I think this is important. Please
I had the same issue, what you have to understand is the the detection also only really works coming from the left side and some what in front of you. I noticed this from every time i make bends on highway and im on the left and there are roadblocks to my left my Breaks will go off or if im changing lanes from left to right due to a car wanting to turn the car will just slam on breaks even though im safely controlling the situation. For majority of the time i have it off. I always figured since the sensor is on the left side of the car it was normal.
 

lightthief

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I had the same issue, what you have to understand is the the detection also only really works coming from the left side and some what in front of you. I noticed this from every time i make bends on highway and im on the left and there are roadblocks to my left my Breaks will go off or if im changing lanes from left to right due to a car wanting to turn the car will just slam on breaks even though im safely controlling the situation. For majority of the time i have it off. I always figured since the sensor is on the left side of the car it was normal.
If you're getting that many false positives you may want to consider turning the sensitivity down a notch rather than turning it off entirely.
Personally I found the default to be a bit over active for me and I'm in no way an aggressive driver.
Set to the next lowest setting works well for me though.
 


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Ben&Jen

Ben&Jen

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Thanks All...

I wonder what kind of reaction you will get if you set it too real sensitive would it give a better reaction time, just curious.

If it would have been more sensitive I wonder if it would have caught that lady crossing my path running the red light.
 

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The visual cameras are essentially only for identifying road lines, which it does with basic contrast comparison between the black roads and white road lines. The system uses something along the lines of radar/lidar to detect objects.
Cameras may also look for something fairly standardized like a license plate as a secondary confirmation a car is in front of you but that's just speculation on my part.
Actually I'm not sure this is true. I have had the FCW trigger a couple times on a straight highway lane with no one in front of me. This happened when there was a semi on an adjacent lane with the sun positioned to cast a large shadow on the lane in front of me. The only way I can explain this is that the camera contributes to the FCW. Also, you'll notice that a lot of the new dash-cams feature FCW, so obviously the algorithm is available to do this without radar.
 

lightthief

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Actually I'm not sure this is true. I have had the FCW trigger a couple times on a straight highway lane with no one in front of me. This happened when there was a semi on an adjacent lane with the sun positioned to cast a large shadow on the lane in front of me. The only way I can explain this is that the camera contributes to the FCW. Also, you'll notice that a lot of the new dash-cams feature FCW, so obviously the algorithm is available to do this without radar.
Totally possible it's doing other calculations with the camera, which is why I noted that it seemed that that was the cameras primary function. Im not sure if Honda has clearly detailed how each aspect of its system is put to use.
In fact they've avoided specific claims in general, likely for legal reasons.

When you say the forward warning system triggered do you mean the brake warning came on the car actually slowed or braked entirely?

Thankfully in the 9 months of owning my car I haven't been in a situation where it's needed to go past just the brake warning and all of those times there has definetly been an object in front of me.

I'd just imagine a visual assessment alone being enough to trigger actual braking just being far too likely to have an unacceptably high rate of false positives.

That said I could see a scenario where the radar/lidar/whatever signal is catching the corner of the truck. Since the signal would move forward out into an expanding V shape in front of the car and then the information from the camera trying to fill in the shape of the object and including its shadow.

It all ends up being a careful balancing act. For a first generation system on a mass market car it's not bad at all, especially for only an extra $1k.
But I think people still are often coming away with the idea that "the car will drive itself" when that isn't the case at all.
 

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I don't think our FCW has pedestrian detection
It has "there is a physical object directly in front of you and you are moving towards it" detection.

I've had the brake warning come up for people , slowly, crossing the street a bit I front of me. It's also gone off for very tall bushes at the end of a parking lot. And often as I approach my friends closed garage door.

Personally I've seen that it tends to, though not always, ignore items that aren't very tall, say under 2ft.
Others on here swear they've had their breaks fully engage over nothing more than a manhole cover but I have had that be the case for me at all. That seems like such an obvious thing that would need to be accounted for in testing that I have a tough time believing that myself unless their system is calibrated poorly.

Also of note is that it doesn't function under 5mph. Parking lots would be nightmares otherwise.
 

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When you say the forward warning system triggered do you mean the brake warning came on the car actually slowed or braked entirely?
I only got the brake warning with shadows in front of the car...it never actually braked in those situations. I'm sure the system uses both camera and radar input to decide when to actually brake.

I agree, pretty darn good for a first-gen system especially at the price point. In fact I'm amazed at how many Civics I'm seeing on the roads without Sensing. The availability of these features are what drove me to shop for a new car in the first place. I only wish that the made the system over-the-air software upgradable like the Teslas.
 


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I had the exact same scenario as the OP. Although mine activated. It goes case by case I think and probably depends how fast the other car is going. Mine took a second or so to activate, and if it detects that you are braking and maneuvering, I find it doesn't really need to activate itself.

Example: When a car turned out once in front of me while I was doing 90 km/h, I approached the car quickly (obviously) and my CMBS activated, but it only got to the warning message because I reacted quicker than the system. It has 3 stages.

First stage is the verbal and the light warning. If you fail to act, the second stage will apply light to moderate brake pressure. If you still fail to react, the third stage will slam the brakes for you. I only know this form watching a demo video on a 2016 Pilot, and because it happened to me once when someone cut me off and I didn't get to the brake quick enough.

Also an FYI, it can skip Stages 1 and 2 and go straight to 3 if you are going too fast towards the other object (car, person, brick wall, etc) with all the verbal warnings included.

Just to reaffirm what I said before, if you react quick enough, sometimes it will not activate since it senses the driver is reacting towards the object in front. That may not be the case for all, but that's how it works on my car, in theory anyways.
 

TyBu

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Honestly it's pretty dumb. It takes a long time to figure out someone has come into your "lane", and a long time to figure out they've left it. I've had it brake (hard) twice for people turning left in front of me who were definitely already at least half a foot out of my lane, and I've had it NOT brake for people coming into my lane I was about to hit(who were already at least half a foot into the lane and continuing to move into it). And it definitely does not work at all for objects coming from the side at you.

As dumb as it is, I leave it on, because it's still smarter than me at my worst.
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