Too smart for our own good?
SAFETY FEATURES: Advanced systems in cars are great, but only if we use them properly
Picture this scenario: a teenager texts 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 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 handsfree 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.
Automakers are working to make 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 drivers 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.”
The key, he said, is to simplify “how it’s being viewed and how you interact with it.”
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.
One advanced project the supplier is working on is an in-vehicle 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.
It’s very complicated software, said Kelei Shen, executive vice-president of Magna Electronics, 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,” Shen said.
And none of these features will do their job without driver education, said Stephen Beatty, vice-president at Toyota Canada Inc.
“Our research is telling us that the technology inside the car is advancing faster than drivers’ knowledge,” Beatty said.
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 Toyota’s safety features and, in the case of TeenDrive365, to show teenagers how distracting it can 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 rewards drivers with free coffee for not picking up their phones.
“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 design distraction-free in-vehicle technology.
“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.