What you'll learn:
- The challenges associated with semi-autonomous features.
- What activities did respondents consider safe to do while driving autonomously?
- The need to institute safeguard ratings.
There are plenty of reasons to believe the next year will represent a watershed moment in the development of automotive safety features. Model year 2023 and 2024 cars and trucks will not only perform better than today’s vehicles, but the high-tech community has been aggressively creating more and more advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) SoCs and MCUs.
Perhaps the only blemish in the otherwise continuing rise of automotive safety, according to a new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), is that drivers who use partial automation on a regular basis often treat their vehicles as fully self-driving.
The study revealed that regular users of Cadillac Super Cruise, Nissan/Infiniti ProPILOT Assist, and Tesla Autopilot said they were more likely to perform non-driving-related activities like eating or texting while using their partial-automation systems than while driving unassisted.
“The big-picture message here is that the early adopters of these systems still have a poor understanding of the technology’s limits,” said IIHS President David Harkey. “But we also see clear differences among the three owner populations. It’s possible that system design and marketing are adding to these misconceptions.”
Autonomous Features and Challenges
Most of today’s partial-automation systems consist of two main features that are designed to assist in highway driving. Adaptive cruise control keeps the vehicle traveling at a given speed, slowing and accelerating automatically to maintain a set following distance from the vehicles ahead. Lane centering provides continuous steering support to help keep the vehicle in the middle of the travel lane. Some systems also are capable of performing lane changes and other maneuvers.
These benefits, however, come with substantial challenges, too. U.S. lawmakers have been divided for years over how to reform regulations governing self-driving cars and what consumer and legal protections should be included. In addition, the onset of a high level of driving assistance has shown that semi-autonomous operation makes it hard for drivers to remain engaged and tempts them to turn their attention to other things.
To determine how frequent users view this technology, IIHS researchers surveyed around 600 Cadillac, Nissan/Infiniti, and Tesla owners (about 200 each) who routinely use their vehicle’s partial-automation system.
According to survey data, IIHS drivers with semi-autonomous vehicles are becoming confident enough in the self-driving systems to perform non-driving-related activities like eating or texting. Specifically, 53% of General Motors' Super Cruise users reported a willingness to perform non-driving tasks, while 42% of Tesla Autopilot users report a similar sentiment. Only 12% of Nissan ProPilot Assist users said they would be confident enough to take their attention away from driving.
Autonomous Management
Closed-loop systems continuously manage the behavior of a controlled variable by monitoring that variable with sensors and then adjusting actuators to achieve the desired behavior.
One harbinger of things to come was the fact that while all three systems use sensors in the steering wheel to detect when the driver’s hands are on it, only Cadillac’s Super Cruise is designed to allow drivers to take their hands off the wheel for extended periods. The other two systems require drivers to keep their hands on the wheel essentially all of the time. Super Cruise uses a driver-facing camera to monitor whether the driver is looking at the road, as does Tesla’s Autopilot.
In typical use devices such as Autopilot and Super Cruise may include a lockout feature that disables the system and prevents drivers from immediately restarting it. ProPILOT Assist allows the driver to make manual steering adjustments without automatically suspending the lane-centering feature. The same feature deactivates with Autopilot and Super Cruise’s temporarily suspends operation until the driver has stopped steering.
Instead of preaching from the pulpit about why more Americans should embrace semi-autonomous systems, IIHS chose to examine user’s commitments to safety.
The study found Super Cruise and Autopilot users are more likely than ProPILOT users to do things that involve taking their hands off the wheel or their eyes off the road. They’re also more likely than ProPILOT users to say they can do non-driving activities better and more often while using their partial-automation systems. Similarly, Super Cruise users are the most likely and ProPILOT users the least likely to say that an activity they think is unsafe to do when the system is switched off is safe to perform when the system is switched on.
Demographics
Arguably the toughest hurdle designers of automotive systems face may be demographic tendencies. The majority of Super Cruise and Autopilot owners were male, while both sexes were more or less equally represented among ProPILOT owners. Most Super Cruise owners were over 50 years of age. Autopilot owners tended to be younger (a quarter of them were under 35), and ProPILOT Assist owners were more evenly distributed across the age range.
“These results from frequent users of three different partial-automation systems once again drive home the need for robust, multifaceted safeguards,” said IIHS Research Scientist Alexandra Mueller, the lead author of the study and main architect of the Institute’s upcoming safeguards rating program. “Many of these drivers said they had experiences where they had to suddenly take over the driving because the automation did something unexpected, sometimes while they were doing something they were not supposed to.”
There is no script for what to do about this. Partial-automation systems are appealing for their AI capability and ease of use. And although a portion of drivers who’d received attention reminders said the alerts were at least somewhat annoying, the vast majority thought they were helpful and made them feel safer.
Similarly, while a slim majority of the Autopilot and Super Cruise owners who experienced system lockouts said they found them irritating, most survey respondents agreed that lockouts would also make them feel safer once the purpose of the feature was explained to them.
Safeguard Ratings
As Thomas Jefferson so eloquently first noted, some truths are self-evident. But in the case of partial self-autonomy, even here the IIHS feels the need to develop a new ratings program that evaluates the safeguards employed by vehicles with partial automation to help drivers stay focused on the road.
The safeguards will be rated good, acceptable, marginal, or poor. To earn a good rating, systems will need to ensure that the driver’s eyes are directed at the road and their hands are either on the wheel or ready to grab it at all times. Escalating alerts and appropriate emergency procedures when the driver doesn’t meet those conditions also will be required.
IIHS expects to issue the first set of ratings this year. The precise timing is uncertain because ongoing supply-chain woes in the auto industry have made it more difficult to obtain vehicles for testing.
The human driver must still handle many routine driving tasks that the systems aren’t designed to do. The driver also has to monitor how well the automation is performing its tasks and always be ready to take over if anything goes wrong. While most partial-automation systems have some safeguards in place to help ensure drivers are focused and ready, none of them meets all of the pending IIHS criteria.
“The way many of these systems operate gives people the impression that they’re capable of doing more than they really are,” said IIHS’s Mueller. “But even when drivers understand the limitations of partial automation, their minds can still wander. As humans, it’s harder for us to remain vigilant when we’re watching and waiting for a problem to occur than it is when we’re doing all the driving ourselves.”
No technology can determine whether someone’s mind is focused on driving. However, technology can monitor a person’s gaze, head posture, or hand position to ensure they’re consistent with someone who is actively engaged in driving.
The new IIHS ratings will aim to encourage safeguards that can help reduce intentional and unintentional misuse. They will not address other functional aspects of the systems that could also potentially contribute to crashes, such as how well cameras or radar sensors identify obstacles.
To earn a good rating, IIHS believes systems should use multiple types of alerts to quickly remind the driver to look at the road and return their hands to the wheel when they’ve looked elsewhere or left the steering unattended for too long.
Evidence shows that the more types of alerts a driver receives, the more likely he or she will notice them and respond. IIHS believes these alerts must begin and escalate quickly. Alerts might include chimes, vibrations, pulsing the brakes, or tugging on the driver’s seat belt. The important thing is that the alerts are delivered through more channels and with greater urgency as time passes.