It will be interesting to watch how it unfolds.. Tesla is claiming they'll have full autonomy in a few years with little more hardware than the existing ACC Volt (many more cameras, souped up ultrasonics and vastly more processing.. all relatively cheap from a bill of materials perspective). Almost everyone else (?) is using prohibitively expensive LIDAR units for full autonomy. Given pedestrians and cyclists not to mention winding roads and inconsistent traffic I suppose it's not hard to understand although hard to see it going mass scale without breakthroughs in solid state lidars (or really good vision/processing in Tesla's case).
I can certainly understand how first gen lane departure systems could be rather annoying. The newer systems that don't make noise but rather just nudge the steering wheel I think are actually LESS intrusive. More often than not I find the small nudge helpful although in some cases it can be annoying. I also have the front crash alert enabled which blasts an alarm and flashes the red LEDs on the windshield.. 90% of the time it's annoying but there was ONE time when I wasn't paying good enough attention in traffic and it really saved me. So now I put up with it (and slow down well in advance of stopped traffic).
The little lane keeping icon on the dash goes amber or disappears when it doesn't have a solid lock on the lanes.. Until the cameras/software get strong enough that the icon is green 99.9% of the time, I wouldn't want to relinquish the wheel.. even on flat open highway in good visibility. But I'm sure we'll get there eventually.
