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Driverless Cars Street Legal Now In Three States, If The Computer Crashes Your Car Is It Your Fault?
“With an almost exponential increase in the development of new technologies for driver assistance and support in vehicles, the topic of this special issue seemed very appropriate,” said Guest Editor Natasha Merat. “The issue brings together research results on the effect of automation in vehicles on human factors and driver behavior and provides a valuable collection of papers from North America and Europe outlining the most recent research in the area.”
The research in this issue represents a range of topics, including in-vehicle warning systems, driver-system interaction, user experience, and drivers’ willingness to accept and trust smart cars. The following is a sampling of articles included in the special issue:
- “Fatigue and Voluntary Utilization of Automation in Simulated Driving”
- “Driving With a Partially Autonomous Forward Collision Warning System: How Do Drivers React?”
- “Sharing Control With Haptics: Seamless Driver Support From Manual to Automatic Control”
- “Trust in Smart Systems: Sharing Driving Goals and Giving Information to Increase Trustworthiness and Acceptability of Smart Systems in Cars”
“Rapidly developing vehicle technology will likely change driving more in the next five years than it has changed in the previous fifty, and understanding how drivers will respond to these changes is critical,” said Guest Editor John D. Lee. “This special issue offers the first collection of papers on highly automated vehicles with a focus on how technology will affect drivers and provides a view into the future of driving.”
The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society is the world’s largest nonprofit individual-member, multidisciplinary scientific association for human factors/ergonomics professionals, with more than 4,600 members globally. HFES members include psychologists and other scientists, designers, and engineers, all of whom have a common interest in designing systems and equipment to be safe and effective for the people who operate and maintain them. “Human Factors and Ergonomics: People-Friendly Design Through Science and Engineering”
The roads of Nevada are going to be filling up with more cars — but not as many drivers. After extensive testing, Nevada has approved Google’s application to test driverless cars on public streets.
There are some rules. Two humans need to be on board, one in the driver’s seat, just in case. But the car may drive itself better than some human, some meatbag, could because it won’t get distracted.
Bryant Walker Smith is with the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. He says it could help traffic. Eventually.
Bryant Walker Smith: By automating driving, cars may someday be able to be lighter, smaller, use less space, travel closer together, generally use the existing roadway infrastructure more efficiently. Now that’s very long-term. In the short term, we may actually see something very different, which is self-driving cars behaving more cautiously, keeping more space, taking longer at stop signs.
And even further down the, uh, road, we could see a fundamental change in how we live.
Smith: For example, if I can sleep in my car, or I can do work and hold more meetings, I may be willing to take more trips. In the long term, I may be willing to send my car without anyone in it, and that may change land development patterns.
The hard work is left to be done by the DMV,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Automotive Research. Still, he points to a statistical basis for safety that the DMV might consider as it begins to develop standards.
After crunching data on crashes by human drivers, Walker Smith noted in a blog post earlier this year: “Google’s cars would need to drive themselves (by themselves) more than 725,000 representative miles without incident for us to say with 99 percent confidence that they crash less frequently than conventional cars. If we look only at fatal crashes, this minimum skyrockets to 300 million miles. To my knowledge, Google has yet to reach these milestones.”
