Monitors of self-driving cars find it tough to stay awake

As Ford has been developing self-driving cars, it has noticed a problem during test drives: Engineers monitoring the robot rides are dozing off.

Company researchers have tried to roust the engineers with bells, buzzers, warning lights, vibrating seats and shaking steering wheels. They’ve even put a second engineer in the vehicle to keep tabs on his human counterpart.

No matter — the smooth ride was just too lulling and engineers struggled to maintain “situational awareness,” said Raj Nair, product development chief for the Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker.

“These are trained engineers who are there to observe what’s happening,” Nair said in an interview. “But it’s human nature that you start trusting the vehicle more and more and that you feel you don’t need to be paying attention.”

The struggle to prevent snoozing-while-cruising has yielded a radical decision: Ford will venture to take the human out of the loop by removing the steering wheel, brake and gas pedals from its driverless cars debuting in 2021. That sets Ford apart from most automakers, including Audi and General Motors, which believe drivers can be counted on to take the wheel if an accident is imminent.

BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen’s Audi plan to roll out semiautonomous cars starting next year that require drivers to take over with as little as 10 seconds notice. On a scale embraced by the U.S. government, these cars would qualify as Level 3 — more capable than cars where drivers do everything but short of full automation.

Ford plans to skip that level altogether. The automaker has aligned with Alphabet’s Waymo, which made similar discoveries related to human inattention while researching Google’s driverless car.