Emergency vehicle lights can harm the automated driving system

Driver Inattention: What Makes a Fully Automated Autonomous Vehicle a Better One? A Study of Drivers and Systems with Shared Control

“These results suggest that small differences in system design can nudge drivers toward safer habits,” said IIHS president David Harkey in a statement.

There is a lot of difficulty in distinguishing fully automated driving systems from ADAS. Shouldn’t the car be described as self-driving orautonomous if it is controlling speed, braking, lane centering, and lane changes with your hands in your lap all the time? It’s no surprise people conflate driver-assistance systems with self-driving.

IIHS wanted to learn how systems handle the issue of driver inattention. The researchers conducted a survey of owners of cars with partial automation who use it often.

There are more instances of distracted driving, and why wouldn’t there be? When an ADAS frees you from the responsibility of driving, what are you going to do with the time? Pick up their phones.

Some models allowed steering input, while others did not. Ford’s BlueCruise and Nissan / Infiniti’s ProPilot Assist remain switched on when the driver makes steering adjustments within the lane, which IIHS refers to as “shared control.” When the driver gives steering input, the Super Cruise and autopilot systems turn off lane centering support. Nissan and Tesla require drivers to keep their hands on the wheel, while Ford and GM allow hands-free driving under certain conditions.

The survey results show that people with cars that allow shared control are less likely to keep their hands off the wheel than people who don’t.

In 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a standing general order requiring automakers to report crashes involving autonomous vehicles as well as Level 2 driver-assist systems found in millions of vehicles on the road today. Companies are now required to document collisions when ADAS was in use within 30 seconds of impact and report those incidents to the government. Two of the leading car brands, Ford andTesla, are currently under investigation.

While the findings are alarming, this new research comes with several caveats. The researchers were not able to test their theories on any specific driving systems. They ran their tests using off-the-shelf automated driving systems, which were bought from Amazon. (These products are marketed as including some collision detection features, but for this research, they functioned as cameras.) The images from those systems were fed into the object detectors and trained to distinguish different objects. The researchers aren’t sure whether any automakers use the object detectors tested in their paper. It is possible that most systems are already hardened against light vulnerabilities.