The reviewer below confirms what I thought likely from a much shorter test drive.
Pro Pilot Assist is quite effective at doing what a level two semi-autonomous system system can do, and is also unlikely to give drivers the
dangerously false impression that you can depend on it to do anything more.
Long-Term 2018 Nissan Leaf: Electric Autonomy—Putting Nissan’s Pro Pilot Assist to the Test
The good, the bad and the merely irritating of semi-autonomous driving
The autonomous driving experience has been, up until recently, an expensive technology reserved for luxury cars. Among others, Nissan is working to bring partial autonomous driving to lower-priced machines. Nissan’s ProPilot Assist is part of a technology package that cost just $650 on our long-term Leaf. That’s a ridiculously good deal. The Leaf’s tech package also includes automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection, intelligent lane intervention, an electronic parking brake and high beam assist. ProPilot Assist is also available on the Nissan Rogue as well as Infiniti’s new QX50 crossover.
Okay, so ProPilot is cheap and available (like me when I was single) but is it any good?
... the problem with driving back to LA late in the afternoon is that you’ll hit traffic in just about every city and small town in San Diego, Orange and LA counties, and the drive on this particular day was more grueling than usual. However, ProPilot made the trek tolerable. It was a big relief to let the Nissan manage the brakes and throttle as I crawled through these traffic jams. About halfway through this three-and-a-half-hour slog, I realized that ProPilot is actually smoother at braking in traffic than I am. And battling gridlock is really one of the best uses for this or any other autonomous driving system. When it’s engaged, you’ll never have to worry about a panic stop, when the traffic speed suddenly drops to single digits—or a dead stop.
No doubt, ProPilot has some limitations. It’s certainly not a system that you can set and forget on every freeway while humming along at 70 mph. But then again, none of today’s systems should be relied upon in this way. My findings on this road trip confirmed that that perhaps the best use of the tech is in rush hour commuting. ProPilot made me way more patient during the drive and way less irritated afterwards. I’d call that a big success...
Read more:
http://autoweek.com/article/car-reviews ... z5JCTTNO2Z