Cooperative Steering Can Influence the Driving Behavior of Autonomous, Self-Driving, and Self-Assisting Vehicles

The president of IIHS said that small differences in design can influence drivers towards safer habits.

Most people have a lot of difficulty distinguishing between ADAS and fully automated driving systems. If the car is controlling acceleration, braking, and lane centering as well as performing automatic lane changes and monitoring blind spots — and your hands are in your lap the whole time — why shouldn’t that be described as self-driving or autonomous? It’s no surprise people conflate driver-assistance systems with self-driving.

IIHS was interested in learning how different systems approached this issue of driver inattention. The group’s researchers conducted an online survey of 1,260 owners of Ford, General Motors, Nissan / Infiniti, and Tesla vehicles equipped with partial automation who regularly use the technology.

There are also more instances of distracted driving when using ADAS — and why wouldn’t there be? When an ADAS lets you take your hands out of the driver’s seat, what are you going to do with the free time? Pick up their phones.

Some models allowed for steering input, while others did not. The driver of the Nissan/Ingall ProPilot Assist will still have BlueCruise and ProPilot Assist on when he makes a steering adjustment within the lane. GM’s Super Cruise and Tesla’s Autopilot system turn off lane centering support when the driver gives steering input. Ford and GM allow hands-free driving in certain conditions, but Nissan and other companies insist that drivers keep their hands on the wheel.

“These findings suggest that cooperative steering may have an implicit influence on how willing drivers are to take action when the situation calls for it, regardless of how they think their system is designed,” study author Alexandra Mueller said in a statement.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration required automakers to report crashes involving self-driving cars and Level 2 driver- assist systems found in millions of cars on the road today. Companies are now obliged to document accidents when AHB was in use, and report them to the government. Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems, as well as Ford’s BlueCruise, are both currently under investigation.

While the findings are alarming, this new research comes with several caveats. For one thing, the researchers were unable to test their theories on any specific driving systems, such as Tesla’s famous Autopilot. Instead, they used five of the off-the-shelf automated driving systems from Amazon and ran their tests. These products are marketed as collision detection features, but they functioned as cameras for this research. They trained the four object detectors to distinguish different objects through the images that had been captured on those systems. The researchers aren’t sure whether any automakers use the object detectors tested in their paper. It could be that most systems are already hardened against flashing light vulnerabilities.