Catherine Ellis* says today’s car technology has the potential to save countless pedestrian lives, but it is usually sold as an optional extra.
Have we become numb?
Pedestrian deaths in car accidents have hit record levels, but potentially lifesaving driver assistance tech is often seen as “nice to have” rather than essential.
Some 270,000 pedestrians are killed globally every year.
Despite that, driver assistance features like lane-keeping and collision detection are typically listed as optional extras alongside luxuries like leather steering wheels and heated seats.
Some automakers are pushing to make the roads safer for pedestrians (Volvo, for example, is pushing driver assistance particularly hard, and earlier this year announced a new system that will monitor your behaviour at the wheel, and intervene if you seem to be distracted or drunk), but they are the exception.
For the most part, protecting pedestrians seems to rank alongside metallic paint and a towbar.
We asked Jack Weast, vice president of autonomous vehicle standards and senior principal engineer at Intel Mobileye, why the advanced safety features that could save pedestrians’ lives aren’t more common — particularly in fleet vehicles like trucks, taxis and buses.
Selfish or scared?
Mobileye is a system that helps drivers avoid collisions — with other motorists or pedestrians — using inexpensive cameras, usually fitted behind the rear-view mirror.
It can issue warnings if you’re drifting out of your lane, you’re about to hit the car in front, or you’re close to hitting a pedestrian.
In recent years, the system has also been able to intervene by performing an emergency stop or turning the wheel if your lane discipline has slipped.
Mobileye can be built into new production vehicles or retrofitted to existing ones, and although it’s mostly used by businesses and local authorities for fleets, you could have it fitted to your own car if you wanted.
“I’m not a psychologist, but people will pay for things that make them safer, but for others perhaps they’re a little selfish,” Weast says.
“I think the biggest challenge is really one about education.”
“These technologies are a little tricky to describe.”
“What’s a lane departure warning?”
“Or what’s an FCW? That’s a forward collision warning.”
“The techy nature, sometimes, of how the technology is described, makes it difficult for regular folks to understand what it is, and why it would benefit them.”
“And then you have automakers concerned that ‘OK, if I add a couple hundred dollars extra cost and I’ve got to make up that cost, how do I explain the technology?’”
“We are starting to see though globally, as data comes out that shows remarkable and incredible improvements in safety, governments are realising that this can’t be an optional technology.”
“We’ve got to start making this a required technology.”
Weast notes that carmakers in the EU will soon be legally required to install some kind of driver assistance system, and those in the US have voluntarily committed to making it a baseline feature.
Winning trust
There’s also the issue of trust, which is proving a major sticking point for many self-driving car manufacturers.
Intel has spent time researching trust, vehicles and automation using people from all walks of life.
It’s found that while people are initially sceptical of driver assistance systems, disliking the idea of a car that can take control out of their hands, once they’ve actually tried it, they quickly come round to the idea.
“We think one of the reasons why people don’t trust the technology is because they don’t understand it,” says Weast.
Intel’s research found several “tension points” — contradictions between what drivers think they want from assistance technology, and what is actually practical in reality.
For example, they might think they want all the information possible about what the car is “seeing” and how it’s making its choices, but when presented with that, they find it overwhelming.
“So, on one hand they want all the information, on the other hand they get annoyed with it very quickly,” says Weast.
Safety vs usefulness
It’s not just the public, though; Intel also needs to win the trust of businesses and governments (which will be weighing up the advantages of advanced driver assistance against the cost), as well as regulators.
Weast says that predictability is one of the biggest factors there — consistent behaviour regardless of the vehicle involved.
“We think safety is something that should not be proprietary,” he says.
“Our belief is for industry to gain trust with consumers and trust with regulators, all of those vehicles should be equally safe, and not be crashing into things or people along the way while they’re trying to get you to where you want to go.”
“We think of that as an excellent area for industry standardisation, so we can have a common definition of what it means to drive safely.”
It’s all about striking a balance between safety and utility.
As Weast notes, the safest automated vehicle is one that never leaves the garage, and the safest human driver is one who never leaves the couch.
You can’t eliminate 100 per cent of risk if you still want a useful car.
* Catherine Ellis is the downloads and developing technology editor at TechRadar. She tweets at @thecatellis.
This article first appeared at www.techradar.com.
