Subaru Eyesight Review: Every Feature Explained

what's going on thanks for joining me this video is a review of Subaru's eyesight I'll go over all of its main features and let you know if I find them useful or gimmicky and show you them in action for those of you considering if you want them or need them if you got any questions about anything you see drop them in the comments section below let's get to it if you didn't know eyesight is Subaru's name for its suite of autonomous driver assist features now some driver assist features have been mainstream for a long time things like anti-lock braking or cruise control they've been standard in all cars for quite some time now but we're finally seeing some more advanced and useful features make their way from luxury cars to ordinary cars bridging the gap from a car fully driven by a human to a fully autonomous car and they're increasingly becoming standard I'll be showing you these features in my 2019 Ascent which incidentally comes with eyesight as a standard feature and all trims but regardless of which Subaru model you may have the features work the same way although you may not have all of them eyesight works by using two stereo cameras working in unison to assess the road ahead and then it uses computers to provide a host of driver assist features I'll start with my favorite which is adaptive cruise control adaptive cruise control allows you to keep pace with a car in front of you in your travel lane up to the speed that you set in other words it will accelerate or brake on its own to keep you at a preset distance let me show you hitting this button on the steering wheel turns on the system and hitting set will activate it once you hit set whatever speed you were going will be your cruise control speed just like conventional cruise control and that speed will not be exceeded even if there's no car in front of you hitting this button up or down will adjust your speed in five mile increments but if you want to fine tune it you can long press the button in either direction to go to one mile increments you can see I have it set to 55 miles per hour but since there's a truck in front of me Eyesight is adjusting accordingly and keeping me at a preset distance if you decide that distance is too close or too far you can adjust it by hitting these two buttons and of course the icon will give you an indication of where you're at if I go to a lane already occupied by someone the car immediately starts slowing down on its own it doesn't take much to learn to use adaptive cruise control and once you do you'll probably never go back but if you want to use conventional cruise control just long press on these two buttons and you can use conventional cruise control the next prominent feature is not as easy to love as adaptive cruise control but I would argue that it's even more important because it can play a critical safety role and that's lane keep assist Lane keep assist is actually an active feature and that it doesn't just warn you that you're departing your lane but it actually moves the car in the opposite direction for you it's a very subtle effect and if you've never experienced it before it almost feels like you're losing control of the car so this is something that definitely takes some getting used to in fact at first I didn't like it at all but I forced myself to use it for a week to give it a fair shot and I ended up getting used to it and now I use it all the time I just switched lanes and I'm letting go of the wheel as I approach this slight curve here without turning the wheel the car sees that I'll leave my lane if I don't take action so it does it for me as you can see it's a very slight movement and if I leave my hands off the wheel it'll warn me to put my hands back this is important because Lane keep assist is not meant to replace your steering input it's just meant to prevent you from leaving your lane unknowingly so if you were to take your hands off your wheel and leave them off you would bounce from one side of the lane to the other and it would look like you're drunk it would be cool if it actually kept you centered in your lane but it does not do that it's meant to assist you not replace you I would really recommend you give this a shot even if at first you don't like it because if you ever got distracted this can possibly prevent you from hitting a car person or object in another Lane if you were to veer off if you decide you absolutely hate it the back-up is lane departure warning which is just an audio and visual indication that you departed you lane but it will not actively steer the car to help if you want to turn this off there is a button to do it let me show you pre collision throttle management you can see here that I'm very close to the cement wall I'm gonna hit the gas aggressively which in a normal car would cause me to hit the wall but you'll see that I side knows there's an obstacle there and then it reduces the engine power and alerts me in order to give me enough time to realize the mistake and come to a stop you can imagine how useful this could be if a driver selected say Drive instead of Reverse and didn't realize it pre-collision braking system is arguably the most important eyesight feature because if you're about to hit something like a car or a person and you take no action the car will literally apply the brakes for you I had the opportunity if you want to call it that to see it in action on a recent road trip and honestly it saved me from an accident when the car in front of me slammed on his brakes after changing lanes in a construction zone because of a delayed reaction I not only applied the brakes late but also not hard enough so the system gave me a brief audio indication and then quite literally slammed on the brakes for me I will say it's very abrupt and definitely applies to braking force without locking the brakes not something you want to experience often but nice to know it's got your back in a pinch there may be times when you don't want the system to be on so you can easily turn it off right up here lead a vehicle start is a gimmicky feature that alerts you if the car in front of you moves but you don't like a light this is pretty useless and if you live in New York like I do you'll probably never hear it because whoever's behind you will honk the horn at you three seconds after the light turns green anyways high-beam assist on the other hand is an eyesight feature I absolutely love and it uses the cameras to detect oncoming cars to switch automatically from high to low beams and vice versa it's quite accurate and I found it changing automatically right about when I would have done it on my own anyways so it's a very useful feature it's worth noting that since eyesight uses visible light cameras basically if you have a hard time seeing the road so will eyesight eyesight will work in the rain but if it's a torrential downpour it'll definitely shut off and let you know there's a couple of common Subaru features worth noting even though they're not technically eyesight because they don't use the camera reverse automatic braking uses sonar to detect if there's obstacles behind the car if you're backing up and don't hit the brakes the car will do it for you now the system isn't perfect here you can see me backing up over some tall weeds and it mistakes them for an obstacle and applies the brakes so if you're expecting something like this or will be towing a trailer you can deactivate it by long pressing this icon as well as the backup sonar so it doesn't incessantly beep at you the last feature I'll mention is automatic vehicle hold I've come to love this feature and use it all the time when it's on the car will hold the brakes for you when you come to a stop you have to be completely stopped and apply good pressure to the brakes for it to engage but once you're used to it it becomes second nature this can be helpful on slight grades so the car doesn't roll backwards when you let off the brake or simply to allow you to take off quicker from a light most of the eyesight features are represented by these lights that project onto the windshield these are presumably so that you don't have to take your eyes off the road to know what's going on I didn't cover them because honestly these lights are basically worthless the only time they might come in handy is if the music is too loud and you can't hear a warning but if you can see the lights it means you are looking directly ahead so again pretty much a gimmick nevertheless they are there to serve as eyesight's visual aid so there you have it these are all of the current eyesight features you can expect it's exciting to see how these features continue to make driving safer and we definitely need them now more than ever if you appreciate the video don't forget to give it a like check out the rest of my channel and consider subscribing thanks a lot for watching and take care

Channel: Boost & Shutter

Views: 812,575

Keywords: Subaru eyesight review, eyesight review, Subaru eyesight, what does Subaru eyesight do, can you turn off Subaru eyesight, does Subaru eyesight work at night, eyesight features, Subaru eyesight features, adaptive cruise control, subaru, subaru safety features, subaru ascent features, Lane Keep Assist, Pre-Collision Throttle Management, Pre-collision Braking System, Lead Vehicle Start, High Beam Assist, Reverse Automatic Braking, automatic vehicle hold

Id: Q_BIbviW2fw

Length: 7min 37sec (457 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 25 2019