“Look, Ma, no hands!” A driverless car is one thing. But should a car distract the person in the driver’s seat with movies and things to read too? It sounds like a bad idea. But a new study says disruptions like these may keep a driverless car’s occupant alert. That’s important, because drivers never know when they’ll need to take back over.
Once unimaginable, driverless cars are now on the horizon. A selling point for them has been getting distracted drivers—the ones texting, talking, or applying makeup!—from behind the controls. Machines simply don’t get distracted.
But sitting behind the wheel with nothing to do can be zzzzzzzzzzz. Self-driving cars often lull drivers to sleep. One way to keep the car’s occupants awake may be to offer the very distractions that are now illegal.
Researchers at Stanford University put students into self-driving test cars. The students monitored the car and the road from the driver's seat. Many began to nod off. But very few did so when they read or watched a movie. The distractions worked!
The researchers also studied handoffs between robo-chauffeur and its human. How does the car give control back to a real person? Is the transfer safe? Does the person have time to make adjustments?
Mercedes and Toyota already sell cars that can hit the brakes and stay in their own lane. Cadillac may soon offer a new cruise feature. Super Cruise slows itself if the driver doesn't respond to signals.
As car manufacturers work toward the ultimate driverless car, they admit the human in the car must stay alert. "We are in no way selling this as a technology where the driver can check out," General Motors spokesman Dan Flores says. "You can relax, glance away, but you still have to be aware because you know the technology's not foolproof."
It’s part of a riddle automakers must solve: Getting owners to trust the technology so that they'll use it—but not trusting it too much.
The technology can’t make moral decisions either. Say the car is programmed to avoid debris in the road. At the same time a sizable obstacle is detected, an animal is in the free lane next to the car. Which does the programming choose—avoid the obstacle or the animal?
"There's really a relationship between drivers and cars," says David Sirkin, who helped run the Stanford experiment. He suggests that master and machine are partners on the road. Vigilance will never go out of date.
