Auto or manual

then doing something to trigger that mechanism does not make it automated.

I'm stopping the car to not go through a red traffic light not in order to trigger a mechanism. The mechanism triggers automatically if any of the trigger criteria are met.

Just like an automatic door triggers if the sensor detects somebody..
 
I'm stopping the car to not go through a red traffic light not in order to trigger a mechanism. The mechanism triggers automatically if any of the trigger criteria are met.
No, you're making one action that triggers two mechanisms - The brake itself and the brake-hold.
the mechanism only triggers when something triggers it. It doesn't trigger by itself and is no more 'automatic' than a door latch.

Presumably you still have to press the accelerator or take some other action to disengage this "fully automated" brake, yes? It doesn't just sit there until it decides to disengage itself?
 
Any automatic system responds to triggers. Otherwise how would it work? Are you mistaking automatic for artificial intelligence?

Even an automatic gearbox is responding to triggers.

What would you class as some examples of an automatic system?
 
Not sure what is happening in this thread but I was very disappointed when I left my C Class coupe for my Jag XF and XE to find they didn't have auto hold. So glad my E43 has auto hold :D

I think this probably perfectly highlights why my Mondeo has the problem I describe above. Whilst I have both the torque convertor auto, and an automatic parking brake. I dont have any kind of auto hold function, essentially meaning I have to choose between your option 1 (which annoyingly restarts my engine and trys to creep against the handbrake), knock it into neutral each time, or keep my foot on the brake mimicing auto hold myself.
100% this is the bit that really annoyed me, and being ignorant to auto's caught me off guard when I went to Jag from the Merc.

My pal got his first Merc and couldn't get auto hold working, turned out he was just too light footed to get it activated :p
 
No, you're making one action that triggers two mechanisms - The brake itself and the brake-hold.
the mechanism only triggers when something triggers it. It doesn't trigger by itself and is no more 'automatic' than a door latch.

Presumably you still have to press the accelerator or take some other action to disengage this "fully automated" brake, yes? It doesn't just sit there until it decides to disengage itself?

An automated action is one that occurs without direct input. You're applying the brakes to stop the car. The car then automatically holds the brakes as a result, without you asking it to by, for example, pressing a separate button. I'm not sure why that's so hard to understand?

We can pick holes in various aspects of the English language until the cows come home but this one is fairly clear-cut, I think.
 
I used your own definitions and descriptions, so any discrepancies you might have over meaning are down to your own specification.

I started writing a response, but as I did so, Howard responded and summed it up much more succinctly...

An automated action is one that occurs without direct input. You're applying the brakes to stop the car. The car then automatically holds the brakes as a result, without you asking it to by, for example, pressing a separate button. I'm not sure why that's so hard to understand?

...you appear to be conflating a mechanism that's automatic (ie, one which can keep operating in the same state after an input) with an entirely automated process (ie, a car deciding when to apply the brakes for you without any input), and claiming that only the latter constitutes being called "automatic".
If we follow your logic to it's ultimate conclusion, then there aren't any processes in a car that we can really consider automatic, because they were all ultimately the result of you getting in and turning the key.

Hence the machine gun analogy. All you do is squeeze the trigger....that triggers an automatic mechanism which releases the firing pin, fires the round, cycles the bolt to eject the cartridge and load a new one, etc, and that cycle continues, and doesn't stop until you release the trigger.
Yes, that process requires two inputs - one to start and one to stop - but it would be absurd to claim that because there's a modicum of input from the user, therefore that no part of that process in between is automatic.

So going back to the original post which started all this....using an auto hold process does not mean you aren't ultimately in control of what the vehicle is doing, but that doesn't mean that "auto hold" is somehow a misnomer.

And I'm sorry if you think I'm being obtuse, I'm not. I honestly didn't think that such a small distinction required explaining, hence my frustrated reply.
 
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I had to real the manual before working out how to operate an automatic gearbox
On the merc, you stamp the brake pedal. Does that disengage the transmission or does it just put the ebrake on?

Most cars its actually activating and holding the brake line pressure rather than the physical handbrake.

JLR now has the 'enhanced auto hold' aswell as auto hold Cant recall exact difference. Much better when i went from a Velar without it to a Evoque, risk of roll back on engine restart was awful.

In current I know rolling to a stop the car with auto hold and will activate my brake lights but if i slow the car and push in some pedal effort when stopped and then take foot off pedal the brake lights go off but the car is held - I tend to do that to avoid the high power LED lights being on burning through the battery in 20mins ;)
 
I had to real the manual before working out how to operate an automatic gearbox


Most cars its actually activating and holding the brake line pressure rather than the physical handbrake.

JLR now has the 'enhanced auto hold' aswell as auto hold Cant recall exact difference. Much better when i went from a Velar without it to a Evoque, risk of roll back on engine restart was awful.

In current I know rolling to a stop the car with auto hold and will activate my brake lights but if i slow the car and push in some pedal effort when stopped and then take foot off pedal the brake lights go off but the car is held - I tend to do that to avoid the high power LED lights being on burning through the battery in 20mins ;)
Make sense. I never noticed it in conjunction with auto stop/start as my dash cam made the car think the battery was too low from about day 2 of ownership (on both the XE and XF :p)
 
Any automatic system responds to triggers.
Yes of course... but of it's own volition or in response to an external trigger, not in response to human actions. Indeed, many safety systems are automatic for situations where a human is unable to take actions, such as a personal flotation device that auto-inflates when it hits salt water.

Otherwise how would it work? Are you mistaking automatic for artificial intelligence?
Not unless you're going to argue that machine guns and handbrakes are governed by AI...

What would you class as some examples of an automatic system?
As well as the PFD above...

My Climatronic system that alters the fan speed and airflow temperature to maintain whatever cabin temperature I set. I don't tell it to go warmer or blow slower, it just responds to the temperature changes. Arguably that's just programming though, which is technically automated rather than automatic.
ABS - You apply the brake, but that does not define when the ABS does or does not kick in. The trigger for ABS is something not initiated or controlled by a human.
Same for airbag deployment - The human doesn't (usually) choose to heavily impact the front of the car, yet that's the trigger.

Also, weird as it may seem, self-loading firearms are actually a very good example - The cycling of spent cases and fresh rounds is not operated by a separate control. This is regarded as an automatic operation, as the pulling of the trigger only trips the mechanism to fire the round - The reload mechanism requires the round to actually fire in order to cycle, which is why a misfire will not cycle the action even though I have pulled the trigger, and why a cooked-off round will still cycle the action even though I have not pulled the trigger - The two are technically independent, with the latter only triggered (pun intended) by the former.
Like the firing mechanism, your brake-hold cannot deploy unless you press the brake pedal to trip it.... (I hope)...? It's part and parcel of that same mechanism, just as an optional extra process.

An automated action is one that occurs without direct input. You're applying the brakes to stop the car. The car then automatically holds the brakes as a result, without you asking it to by, for example, pressing a separate button.
You've already pressed that seperate button - It's the one that turns the hold mechanism on.
More importantly, you can turn it on and off whenever you like, so you pressing the brake decides exactly when it will and won't activate.
If the car can, in response to whatever other reasons or external triggers, decide not to deploy the hold mechanism regardless of what you have pressed, then it would be automatic. But as is, you're pressing the brake knowing that it will also trip the brake-hold latch.

We can pick holes in various aspects of the English language until the cows come home but this one is fairly clear-cut, I think.
It is fairly, yet people are posting definitions and then contradicting them in their subsequent assertions.

...you appear to be conflating a mechanism that's automatic (ie, one which can keep operating in the same state after an input) with an entirely automated process (ie, a car deciding when to apply the brakes for you without any input), and claiming that only the latter constitutes being called "automatic".
Automatic is something that happens without direct human input.
Automated is where a machine undertakes a role that was previously done by the human.
No, I'm not conflating them and nor am I confusing them.

If we follow your logic to it's ultimate conclusion, then there aren't any processes in a car that we can really consider automatic, because they were all ultimately the result of you getting in and turning the key.
Do modern cars not have alarms, then? :p

Ultimate results of one action is not the same as a direct result of one.

Hence the machine gun analogy. All you do is squeeze the trigger....that triggers an automatic mechanism which releases the firing pin, fires the round, cycles the bolt to eject the cartridge and load a new one, etc, and that cycle continues, and doesn't stop until you release the trigger.
As described above - That is inaccurate. It's also another example of ultimate results, in this case a sequence of results, which are initiated by one action but depend solely upon the preceeding result in order to trigger rather that each being a direct result of human input.

There are firearms that cycle the firing mechanism and operate the reloading mechanism all through one user-input action, but they are not automatic or even semi-automatic. A Gatling gun would actually be one such example, as it will cycle all those mechanisms without you even needing ammo in it.

So going back to the original post which started all this....using an auto hold process does not mean you aren't ultimately in control of what the vehicle is doing, but that doesn't mean that "auto hold" is somehow a misnomer.
Actually my original remark was about the auto-handbrakes (and these days E-brakes), not auto-hold.
But to use your own definition, the auto-hold cannot operate unless you both conciously enable it and then later depress the brake pedal, thus requiring direct action from you to trigger it, and thus in no way automatic. That makes it a misnomer.

And I'm sorry if you think I'm being obtuse, I'm not. I honestly didn't think that such a small distinction required explaining, hence my frustrated reply.
I make a lot of effort to choose my words quite precisely because people so often do make those distinctions (and frequently incorrectly) which result in perspectives being at odds.
 
Yes of course... but of it's own volition or in response to an external trigger, not in response to human actions

It responds to an external trigger - the car being stationary. If I did absolutely nothing and let the car roll to a stop it would also activate the handbrake when the vehicle stopped. The operation of the handbrake is automatic.

I don't brake to activate the handbrake, I brake to stop the car.
 
It activates and deactivates by itself without you having to press a button. It’s automatic. Simple.

p.s. Fox you’re really enjoying using dishwashers in analogies since buying a house aren’t you :D
 
It responds to an external trigger - the car being stationary. If I did absolutely nothing and let the car roll to a stop it would also activate the handbrake when the vehicle stopped.
Ah, now that changes things a bit... This aspect had not even been mentioned previously - Every time it was all about the human decision to press the brake pedal, knowing that deliberate action would also trigger the hold, hence challenging it.

I feel this thread would be shorter if someone could understand the difference between 'automatic' and 'autonomous'.
And automated... Indeed, that was the point of my challenge.
But the thread was already 20-something pages long, so do you think it'd make any difference?
 
Ah, now that changes things a bit... This aspect had not even been mentioned previously - Every time it was all about the human decision to press the brake pedal, knowing that deliberate action would also trigger the hold, hence challenging it.

Herein lies the confusion then. When I listed what happened when auto-hold came on, it was meant to simply be a demonstration of the workflow leading up it occurring. I didn't intend "Press brake" and then "release brake pedal" to be read literally as how auto hold gets turned on, but instead of a description of what I'm doing leading up to it.
I wasn't contradicting my own definition, I was trying to explain how it applied to what was happening, but not to my direct inputs.

As usual, someone has managed to explain it better than me twice as well with half the words.
 
I wasn't contradicting my own definition, I was trying to explain how it applied to what was happening, but not to my direct inputs.
You missed out that most fundamental point of your definition, in that the hold mechanism can (and does, if you enable it) deploy without it being triggered by your action. That small point is precisely what makes the difference between a manual mechanism and an automatic one, which is what I was trying to get at.
 
You missed out that most fundamental point of your definition, in that the hold mechanism can (and does, if you enable it) deploy without it being triggered by your action. That small point is precisely what makes the difference between a manual mechanism and an automatic one, which is what I was trying to get at.

Out of interest, if it did only continue to apply the brakes after a braking action, what would you call the function?

'manual hold' doesn't really sound right for a system that continues to apply the brakes after you release the brake pedal :p
 
partial automation ? this came to mind

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