Driver Ahead conference: more training needed on driverless cars

Driverless cars can create confusion unless training meets the fast pace of change and helps drivers cope with a whole new set of demands, according to a conclusion reached by industry experts at London’s ‘Driver Ahead’ conference in London. The IAM RoadSmart/ RAC Foundation/ Pirelli event consisted of over 100 industry experts who set out to map a safe route for driverless cars. Guest speaker Victoria Coren-Mitchell opened the conference by introducing the “death by code” concept
October 12, 2017 Read time: 2 mins

Driverless cars can create confusion unless training meets the fast pace of change and helps drivers cope with a whole new set of demands, according to a conclusion reached by industry experts at London’s ‘Driver Ahead’ conference in London.

The IAM RoadSmart/ 4961 RAC Foundation/ Pirelli event consisted of over 100 industry experts who set out to map a safe route for driverless cars.

Guest speaker Victoria Coren-Mitchell opened the conference by introducing the “death by code” concept, challenging the conference to decide if deaths caused by a computer are better or worse than human error.

Simon Thompson, human factors specialist at 7998 Jaguar Land Rover, said: “Without the driving, there will be the desire to do secondary tasks – but how does the car engage with the driver when it needs him or her? There is a lot more that needs to be done in designing cars so that controls are easier to find, when asking the driver to take over control again.”

Other experts, such as Professor Nick Reed, head of mobility research at 311 Bosch pointed out that drivers could also misuse the vehicle systems, “Any system needs to be aware of the effective use or misuse of it.”

Professor and chair of human factors engineering at Southampton University, Neville Stanton pointed out that there may be times when a driver has nothing to do, then a sudden requirement to intervene in an emergency situation can lead to them panicking and creating a tragedy. He said, “The problem with automation is that it is not currently powerful to render the driver completely redundant. It requires the driver to monitor continuously and intervene occasionally. The car needs to support, not replace the driver.”

Nic Fasci, lead engineer for vehicle engineering and homologation at Tata Motors European Technical centre, said: “The key to autonomous vehicles is training, training, training! The skill of driving must be robotic before the software can be developed. The skill of driving is being eroded and this can be seen every day.”

Related Content

  • June 18, 2015
    Land Rover demonstrates remote-control Range Rover Sport
    Jaguar Land Rover, part of the UK Autodrive consortium, has demonstrated a remote control Range Rover Sport research vehicle, showing how a driver could drive the vehicle from outside the car via their smartphone. The smartphone app includes control of steering, accelerator and brakes as well as changing from high and low range. This would allow the driver to walk alongside the car, at a maximum speed of 4mph, to manoeuvre their car out of challenging situations safely, or even to negotiate difficult off
    Read More
  • May 23, 2018
    AVs could make driving ‘more dangerous’: report
    Automated vehicles (AVs) could make driving more dangerous – that is the stark suggestion from a new report by the International Transport Forum (ITF). The report - Safer Roads with Automated Vehicles? – casts doubt on claims that 90% of road deaths could be avoided because the introduction of AVs would eliminate human error. ITF says such claims are at best “untested”.
    Read More
  • October 12, 2018
    Trust me, I'm a driverless car
    Developing C/AV technology is the easy bit: now the vehicles need to gain people’s confidence. So does the public feel safe in driverless hands – and how much might they be willing to pay for the privilege? The Venturer consortium’s final user and technology test (Trial 3) explored levels of user trust in scenarios where a connected and autonomous vehicle (C/AV) is interacting with cyclists, pedestrians and other road users on a controlled road network. Trial 3 consisted of experimental runs in the
    Read More
  • April 29, 2015
    Foundation funds research for informed campaigning
    ITS International talks to Professor Stephen Glaister, director of the transport research and lobbying organisation, the RAC Foundation. It is through the eyes of an economist that Professor Stephen Glaister, emeritus professor of transport and infrastructure at Imperial College London and director of the RAC Foundation, views current and future transport problems. Having spent 30 years at the London School of Economics and another 10 at Imperial, the move to the RAC Foundation was a radical departure from
    Read More

Highlighted Content