Riding a helper skelter
Fine-tuning the driving aids. By Colin Overland
Like the cast of Grange Hill with their blanket negativity about narcotics, I just say no to accidents. Like Hall and Oates, I can’t go for that. But I’m not at all convinced that the way to stay safe is to have your car try to keep you in the middle of your lane.
So I was intrigued to find, while prodding around the Clio’s touchscreen menus, that you can adjust the lane departure assistance system in nine steps. Nine sounds like overkill, but it’s something you’d set up just once, and leave forever.
There are three time/distance settings – Early, Standard and Late – that let you decide how close to the edge of the lane you are before you’re warned. And there are three settings for the vibration you get through the steering wheel – Low, Middle and High.
The combination of Late and Low works for me. I’m happy to be saved from myself if I am drifting off course, but all it should take is a gentle thrum in your fingertips, which is what you get in Low.
Go to the other extreme, Early and High, and you find yourself driving on tenterhooks, sitting up straight and holding your stomach in to avoid any suspicion that you might be deviating from a geometrically precise central line. Yet sometimes it’s the right thing to do: a wide line can give a better view of the road ahead, or avoid a pothole, or let a filtering motorcyclist past.
The Clio’s system uses sensors detecting white lines, so if the lines are absent you don’t get any guidance. But you do still get another aid: ‘Following-distance warning’. This is like the option you get on cruise control to set how close you go to the vehicle in front, but this is independent of cruise control. It works fine, letting you adjust how close you get before warnings flash and beep, but it seems to me that if I’m really not able to spot that I’m about to ram a Transit up the backside, I should probably just surrender my licence and stick to walking.