Road to autonomy paved with distraction and danger
Cars can’t drive themselves yet, but we act like they can, writes Lorraine Sommerfeld
Houston, we have a problem. Well, not just Houston.
Newly released figures from the National Safety Council in the U.S. are startling. Road fatalities have increased 14 per cent since 2014. After decades of plummeting rates, the recent, hard uptick is concerning for everyone.
While the latest figures available from the government of Canada show that, in 2015, we were still on a slight downward trend (1,669 deaths compared to 1,709 in 2014), law makers and carmakers always watch for signs of troubling trends to the south that often make their way north. We drive the same cars and we play with the same features.
You probably saw the recent article, and others like it, that say automated features in modern cars are making drivers lazy and dangerous. You shouldn’t be surprised; every time a new safety feature is unveiled by one manufacturer, and the others rush to copy it. Driver skill is getting just a little farther away in my rear-view mirror.
Getting a true handle on why the increased fatality rates are occurring is intricate: higher employment and cheaper gas mean more people are driving more miles, and in some areas, high housing costs mean more of those people are extending their commutes.
The safety features in modern cars are breathtaking in scope and complexity, but the overreliance and complacency of drivers threatens to take back with one hand what those safety breakthroughs are giving us with the other.
I’ve been yipping about the downside to the upside for years. New vehicles are capable of performing pretty amazing feats of technology, but too many people are handing over the operation and decision-making to the car. It’s where the road to autonomous driving is leading us, but we’re not there yet. Carmakers are eager to strut their latest stuff, but their eye is on a far bigger prize: full autonomy.
Their holy grail is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Level 5 autonomous driving designation: “Fully autonomous system that expects the vehicle’s performance to equal that of a human driver, in every driving scenario, including extreme environments like dirt roads that are unlikely to be navigated by driverless vehicles in the near future.”
That’s not really what is causing the most concern, however. It’s the Level 3 designation.
“Drivers are still necessary in Level 3 cars, but are able to completely shift ‘safety-critical functions’ to the vehicle, under certain traffic or environmental conditions.”
The vehicle is mostly great — until it’s not, and the driver has to surface from their reverie and take over.
Level 4 is fully autonomous and “designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip.” Level 4 does not cover every driving scenario, hence it’s not Level 5.
We’re in a terribly dangerous phase of our driving culture despite the explosion of technological advancement. We are neither here nor there; we’re in the middle of a transition that can have no totally safe mode.
We have exciting, ever-changing automatic features on our cars, but many drivers who either don’t know how to use them or trust them too much endanger themselves and those around them.
If fatality rates continue to spike in the U.S. at the alarming double-digit rate of the past two years, manufacturers and law makers will have to reassess their dash to the finish line. Too many bodies piled up on the way to a promised utopia of far fewer casualties makes for lousy optics.
Everyone from the Centers for Disease Control to Mythbusters has proven that hands-free use of a device is just as dangerous as hand-held. It’s your cognitive ability that’s compromised, and your mind is sunk deep into a conversation rather than the road, whether you’re holding the phone or not. Increased fines and punishments are being implemented in most jurisdictions, but too many users are mirroring the bluster of that other ornery group who have declared you will have to take it from their cold, dead hands. And increasingly, that’s what is happening.
Why shoulder check if you have a chime that will let you know what’s up? Why look outside your car windows before you back up if your camera is showing you what’s back there? Why not stab through layers of onscreen directions to find that playlist, even if your eyes are off the road? Why worry about tailgating when your car will brake for you? Who cares if you’re texting when your lane-departure warning will let you know you’ve LOL-ed once too often? Too many people drive like they’re bowling in an alley with the bumper guards up. What can go wrong? A system can fail. A driver can get in a car without those bumper guards. The same way traction control has a generation not even knowing their car just saved them from spinning out of control, we’ll have drivers forgetting they’re making multiple errors, some of which could be tragic without that car-as-lifeguard technology.
I don’t care if every car has parking assist and nobody ever has to learn to parallel park again. Parallel parking is useful, but not vital to staying alive. It’s an assist, not a safety feature. Not knowing you’re drifting all over the road or about to smash the car ahead of you is dangerous, and until the car can make the entire chain of decisions, a driver is required to know what to do. Too many are forfeiting that knowledge.
If you read this column with any regularity, you know I detest the word “infotainment.” Information is information, entertainment is entertainment. Manufacturers who collide these together do a disservice to the consumers they have pledged to protect. Learn how to work your on-board navigation system (including traffic settings and things like toll roads) when you’re in dry dock. Program it and leave it alone.
Manufacturers, don’t make me rabbit-hole down three levels of screens to adjust the temperature or cancel the nav lady’s voice. Drivers, start using your mirrors and stop relying on a flash from your side mirror to let you know what’s going on around you.
I don’t want Canadian statistics to begin trending in the same direction as the American numbers. Our stricter laws are a help; only 29 U.S. states and D.C. have laws requiring all occupants to wear a seatbelt.
We die on our roads because we drive too fast, we drive impaired, we drive distracted and we don’t buckle up.
How do you save someone from themselves? We’re not there yet.