In April 2020, Buick's advanced intelligent driver assistance technology was officially released with the new generation of GL8 Evia family. The Evia models of the time offered 20 advanced intelligent driver assistance features and supported FOTA remote upgrades. Today, Buick is constantly enriching the functionality of its vehicles through remote upgrades. At the end of last year, at the beginning of this year, Buick's 14 models and more than 600,000 vehicles ushered in a new round of OTAs. In this upgrade, it is still the GL8 family that takes the lead, and the Avia and ES Luzun models have added some driving assistance functions through this upgrade.
Before the experience, the staff showed us the process of OTA upgrade, when there are vehicle functions that can be upgraded, the system will automatically pop up an upgrade window, directly click upgrade. In addition, in the settings page, you can also find the entrance to the system upgrade. After clicking, the system will calculate the time required for the current upgrade, and the vehicle can be hooked into P gear and the engine can be turned off to start the upgrade.
This update is mainly to add the name of ILC driver command lane change function, this function is more interesting, by flicking the steering lever, the vehicle can achieve lane change, each time changing lanes. Simply put, if you hit the left turn, the vehicle will automatically change lanes to the left, and when you hit the right turn, the vehicle will change lanes to the right. However, there are several restrictions on the realization of this function, one is that it needs to rely on the road surface with a clear marking line; the second is that before the vehicle changes lanes, the system needs to confirm the safety of the target lane; and the third is that the function needs to be opened after the LCC lane center intelligent cruise function is turned on, and the speed is greater than 40 kilometers per hour.
After meeting the opening conditions, the lane line on the dashboard will turn green, and after hitting the steering, etc., the vehicle will automatically open the lane change. After experiencing it, this newly added accessibility function made me feel like a calm word. The first is because its opening conditions are more stringent, so after enabling the function, it will bring people a sense of security; the second is that the whole lane change process is natural and smooth, flowing with clouds, no abrupt, blunt feeling, like an old driver driving.
In addition to the newly added ILC driver command lane change, Buick's advanced intelligent driver assistance technology can also achieve many functions, such as traffic congestion assistance system, lane departure warning system, forward collision warning system and so on. During this experience, the lane departure warning system made a good impression on me. On many models that have been test-driven before, after triggering the lane departure warning, the steering wheel correction will be very strong, as if it is competing with the driver for the steering wheel, and it is very scary. The system on the GL8 Evia, the strength of the correction will not be very arbitrary, more is to remind the driver, the whole process is very smooth, the driver's psychological burden will be much smaller.
Before this experience, when I learned the specific operation process of the ILC driver command lane change function, there was actually some doubt, when we had a lane change request in daily driving, we observed the rear, turned on the turn signal, and then began to turn the steering wheel to change lanes, which was a complete process. At this stage, when the auxiliary driving system is turned on, if you want to change lanes, I still need such a set of processes, observe the rear car condition, turn on the turn signals, although the intervention of the driver assistance system can make the last step of lane change no longer be operated by the driver, but the last step saved, bringing the driver limited convenience. So why would Buick bother to roll out such a feature again?
After the experience, I found that the significance of the development of assisted driving outside of this function is the deep meaning of Buick. Taking the GL8 Evia model of this experience as the most expensive model in the GL8 family and the most technologically equipped model, GL8 Evia has achieved a high level of hardware and software in the driver assistance system.
GL8 Aivia forward camera detection distance of 150 meters, the use of Mobileye EyeQ4® fourth-generation image recognition chip, computing power can be 2.5 trillion times per second, can accurately identify vehicles, pedestrians, two-wheelers, lane lines and other target information, matched with the body of 5 high-performance millimeter wave radar and 12 ultrasonic radar, 4 megapixel high-definition panoramic cameras. In addition, the high-performance CPU supports efficient computing and fusion processing of large amounts of raw data, combined with the sensor-integrated system design, which can meet the highest level of functional safety while having strong expansion potential. In other words, existing hardware and software equipment can not only support the model to achieve the current driving assistance function, but also enough to support its higher driving assistance capabilities in the future.
As a key component of Buick's intelligent technology system, advanced intelligent driver assistance technology is being installed in more and more models, and OTA upgrades can quickly make this capability available to users. The newly added ILC driver command lane change function not only improves the vehicle's auxiliary driving ability, but also brings users a more efficient and safe driving experience. However, at present, this high-level driving assistance system is still limited to some high-end models, and it is hoped that Buick can open up these functions to more low-end models when the time is ripe.