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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

How do you feel after those drives of a few hours?

I have driven up to 6 hours at a time, but I'm in hyper-focus mode the whole time and it takes everything I have to stay locked into that focus so I don't die. I think all the time about moving somewhere where I don't need a car. I hate driving and always have.

I recently found out I have ADHD. I haven't tried meds yet (but am having my first meeting with someone tomorrow to explore it as an option). I'm wondering if this will make driving more tolerable for me. It wasn't even something I thought about before this thread.

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Yikes! Yeah no way could I do that without meds. It's amazing hearing of truck drivers driving 13 hours straight... but I guess that's why fighter pilots are on modafinil!

To be honest, now that I'm medicated I think I could at least do 5 hours without stopping. I might need some snacks though - the amount of sugar I've been consuming lately is unnatural

Long drives for me used to be a fucking nightmare, especially long highway drives. Anything over 5 hours was basically an impossibility, now with medication it's really a mild inconvenience. I just moved to a new area, and I have a friend 2 hours away in another town. I don't even think about the drive when making plans, I'll happily drive up, hang out for a few hours, then drive back home. I still have limits on how long I want to drive (did 10-11 hour driving days when I was moving cross country, and that sucked), but they're way higher.

Having a car with lane centering cruise control also helps a ton, at least where I live. Not having to micro-manage a car for several hours when you're on a long drive reduces the cognitive load.

I bought a new-to-me car that supports Comma.ai. It's not full self driving, but it handles the boring parts sitting on the freeway for me. it's the best purchase I've made in recent memory because holy shit sitting there on the freeway forever is the worst.

I tried this, not with comma.ai, but had a VW with lane keeping, adaptive cruise, etc. The first time I did a 6 hour drive with it, it felt like magic. I was essentially on one road the whole time, there was very little traffic, and I didn’t touch the pedals, or really even steer much for 95% of the drive. Just at the start and end when off the expressway.

However, as I made that drive more, it got worse. Traffic was usually heavier, and things didn’t go as well with a lot of traffic. Some of it was how it acted, and some of it were trust issues with it. When traffic picked up or other cars did things around me, I’d switch back to manual control. After a while, I was using manual control the whole time… and then eventually just took the train, because I couldn’t tolerate driving myself anymore.

That seems like a you problem, tbh. If you don't trust it to handle drivers coming into your lane so you couldn't use it and you couldn't rest, neither I, nor the manufacturer can do anything about that. To be fair, given VW's other transgressions, I don't blame you, but I don't have a VW, so I'm don't have to dig into VW's org chart and trust my life in understand how good they [are/aren't] at writing software.

I got a used tesla a few years ago that came with FSD, and I fully agree. I drove to Vegas for DEFCON a few weeks ago and the ~8 hour drive was kind of just a mild inconvenience.

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