National Post (National Edition)
DRIVEN to distraction
TODAY’S CARS ARE SO SMART, THEY ARE MAKING US DUMB.
Picture this scenario: A teenager has just texted his crush, asking for a date. While driving to meet a friend, his phone dings and he thinks it might be her. Excited, he glances down just as a truck brakes in front of him. His parents’ new car, which has all the latest gadgets, senses he isn’t looking at the road and sounds an alarm. Having never heard the alarm before, the teenager is further distracted as he tries to figure out what it means. All this happens in the space of a few seconds but it ends with a rear-end collision.
The complexity of in-vehicle technology is staggering — a typical new car comes with 100 million lines of code, more than a Boeing Co. 787 jet — but it sometimes feels as if that technology is working at cross purposes.
For example, most new vehicles come with elaborate infotainment systems that provide hands-free phone calls, music streaming, voice-activated search, navigation, traffic alerts, information on nearby businesses, and so on. These may be fun and useful, but they can also be distracting as the driver navigates through complex menus to find what he or she is looking for.
Meanwhile, most new vehicles also include high-tech safety features ranging from forward-collision warning systems to lane-departure alerts to dynamic cruise control that will adapt your car’s speed to the speed of the vehicle in front of it.
All this is meant to enhance safety, and the number of fatal collisions on Canadian roads is nearly 40 per cent lower than it was 25 years ago.
But these features can also lull the driver into a false sense of security — or be distracting themselves if drivers haven’t been properly trained on how to use them.
The U.S. National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration is investigating Tesla vehicles that include the company’s “Autopilot technology,” which allows the cars to drive on highways on their own. In May, a 40-year-old Ohio man, Joshua Brown, died in a collision with a truck while his Tesla Model S was in autopilot mode.
Tesla describes the auto-steering technology as in beta stage and cautions drivers to pay attention and keep their hands on the steering wheel while they’re using it. Videos Brown posted to YouTube before his death show him using the vehicle with his hands off the wheel.
Automakers are working to better unite the two, making infotainment systems easier and safer to use on the road, while also improving driver education about the safety features of their cars.
One key element of this is software that allows users to sync their phones with their vehicle so they don’t have to keep glancing at them in order to make phone calls, read texts or look at maps while they’re driving. The biggest leaders in this space are Alphabet Inc.’s Android Auto and Apple Inc.’s CarPlay, but several automakers have also developed their own systems.
“Automakers are very cognizant of creating a system that is designed to deliver the content (buyers) want but increasingly they need to design it so it’s not going to distract the drivers at all,” said Mark Boyadjis, senior automotive technology analyst at IHS. “There’s a lot of complexity in it, but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated.”
Boyadjis said the infotainment systems in Volvo AB’s XC90 and BMW AG’s 7 Series, as well as Ford Motor Co.’s Sync 3 system, stand out as some of the best examples of user-friendly, non-distracting software.
“The common thread is that they’ve reduced the graphical complexity of the display,” he said. “They haven’t removed the content, they haven’t removed what the person wants to view, but they’ve simplified how it’s being viewed and how you interact with it.”
He added that gesture- and speech-recognition technologies are improving rapidly, which also make the systems safer to use on the road.
Software engineers at the automotive industry’s biggest players are working on ways to detect when drivers are distracted and prompt them to pay attention.
GM and Hyundai are studying technology that tracks drivers’ eye movements and alerts them when they’re drifting. Uber is testing features that use the accelerometers and gyroscopes in smartphones to track erratic driving.
Magna International Inc., a Canadian supplier that counts all the major automakers among its customers, is also working on ways to detect driver distraction and bring the driver’s focus back to the road, said Kelei Shen, executive vicepresident of Magna Electronics.
One advanced project the supplier is working on is an invehicle camera that tracks the driver’s eye movements to detect when they’re not looking at the road or when they’re getting drowsy, then alerts them. This is complicated software, said Shen, as it has to not only detect when a driver is not looking at the road, but make allowances for normal behaviours like glancing in the side-view mirror.
“If you detect it wrong, then that itself will distract the driver,” said Shen.
Magna is working closely with the automakers to customize how exactly a driver should be alerted without adding to their distraction, he added.
“Rather than some fire-alarm type of audio, which will be very distracting, we can trigger some vibration in the seat or something like that, to tell you to pay more attention,” he said. “We see a clear demand from the market to make driving not only more convenient and more enjoyable but also safer.”
And none of these features will do their job without driver education, said Stephen Beatty, vicepresident at Toyota Canada Inc.
“Our research is telling us that the technology inside the car is advancing faster than drivers’ knowledge,” Beatty said.
To that end, Toyota Motor Corp. has launched several education programs, including KartStart, geared toward kids 10 and up, and TeenDrive365, geared toward teenagers. Both use virtual reality to demonstrate safety features and, in the case of TeenDrive365, to show teenagers how distracting it can be to be at the wheel of a car full of chattering friends, smartphones and music. In Japan, Toyota has developed an app called Driving Barista that tracks how often a driver picks up their smartphone and rewards them with free coffee for showing restraint.
“You can’t spend all your time wagging a finger at people,” said Beatty. “You have to make it easy to do the right thing.”
Toyota Canada has also teamed up with the University of Toronto to research driver safety and is studying how to best design in-vehicle technology, such as warning systems, so as not to distract drivers.
“We need to give the driver everything that he or she needs, with nothing that he or she doesn’t, because anything that is superfluous to that driving experience becomes a potential distraction,” Beatty said. “If we can create a smart vehicle that actually operates as a partner to you, then the potential for distraction is greatly reduced.”