A Test Drive of the Most Advanced Driverless Cars

A Test Drive of the Most Advanced Driverless Cars | MIT Technology Review

The relationship between human and robot driver could be surprisingly fraught. The problem, as I discovered during my BMW test drive, is that it’s all too easy to lose focus, and difficult to get it back. The difficulty of reëngaging distracted drivers is an issue that Bryan Reimer, a research scientist in MIT’s Age Lab, has well documented (see “Proceed with Caution toward the Self-Driving Car,” May/June 2013). Perhaps the “most inhibiting factors” in the development of driverless cars, he suggests, “will be factors related to the human experience.”

In an effort to address this issue, carmakers are thinking about ways to prevent drivers from becoming too distracted, and ways to bring them back to the driving task as smoothly as possible. This may mean monitoring drivers’ attention and alerting them if they’re becoming too disengaged. “The first generations [of autonomous cars] are going to require a driver to intervene at certain points,”Clifford Nass, codirector of Stanford University’s Center for Automotive Research, told me. “It turns out that may be the most dangerous moment for autonomous vehicles. We may have this terrible irony that when the car is driving autonomously it is much safer, but because of the inability of humans to get back in the loop it may ultimately be less safe.”                               

An important challenge with a system that drives all by itself, but only some of the time, is that it must be able to predict when it may be about to fail, to give the driver enough time to take over. This ability is limited by the range of a car’s sensors and by the inherent difficulty of predicting the outcome of a complex situation. “Maybe the driver is completely distracted,” Werner Huber said. “He takes five, six, seven seconds to come back to the driving task—that means the car has to know [in advance] when its limitation is reached. The challenge is very big.”