Are Autonomous and Self-Driving Vehicles Safe? The Impact of Automated Adaptive Driving Systems on Driver Reactivity and Behavior

“These results suggest that small differences in system design can nudge drivers toward safer habits,” said IIHS president David Harkey in a statement.

Most people have a hard time 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 that people think of self-driving as driver assistance systems.

There is compelling evidence that most driver-assistance systems are less safe than normal human driving. Even after a small period of use, drivers tend to develop an overreliance on the system to drive their car. Their reaction times are slower when they take back control of the vehicle.

Why wouldn’t there be more instances of distracted drivers when using ADAS? What are the most popular ways to use the free time after an ADAS? Pick up their phones.

Some models allowed for steering, while others didn’t. When the driver makes steering adjustments within the lane, IIHS refers to as “shared control.” 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 under certain conditions, while Nissan and the like require drivers to keep their hands on the wheel.

The survey results revealed that those whose vehicles allow shared control were “40-48 percent less likely than the others to say they would keep their hands off the wheel in situations that would make most drivers nervous,” IIHS says.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ordered the reporting of crashes involving self driving vehicles as well as Level 2 driver assist systems in order to keep track of how safe they are on the road. Companies are now required to document collisions when ADAS was in use within 30 seconds of impact and report those incidents to the government. Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems, as well as Ford’s BlueCruise, are both currently under investigation.

The new research comes with a few qualms. For one thing, the researchers were not able to test their theories on specific driving systems such as Autopilot. Instead, they ran their tests using five off-the-shelf automated driving systems embedded in dashcams purchased off of Amazon. These products were used for this research, not as collision detection features, but as cameras. They then ran the images captured on those systems through four open source object detectors, which are trained using images to distinguish between different objects. The researchers are unsure if any cars use the object detectors that were tested. Most systems are built to resist flashing light vulnerabilities.