As someone who lives five hours away from their family, I spend a decent amount of time on the road every year. The drive from Indianapolis to Cleveland isn’t a difficult one, but it’s certainly not the most exciting trip. It’s pretty much just hundreds of miles of highway and cornfields. One of the ways to make the trip feel a little less tiring is making good use of driver assistance features. Imagine just setting your speed using adaptive cruise control, then leaning back and letting your car do all the work. It almost sounds too easy to be true, right?
In reality, sitting back and letting your car do the driving isn’t exactly safe. Sure, the adaptive cruise control setting will apply the brakes if you get too close to the vehicle ahead of you, and it will get back up to speed on its own when there’s enough space to do so, but there’s more to driving than that.
On one of my trips, I was using the lane keeping assist feature to help make sure I was staying in the center of my lane. When you start to drift from the lane, your car automatically adjusts for you, keeping you where you need to be. It’s a super handy feature--when it works. In my case, a storm earlier in the trip had blocked off the sensors, disabling some driver assistance features. I didn’t realize that the sensors were blocked until I caught myself drifting to the right of my lane. When the car didn’t self-correct, I realized there was a problem and that I needed to be more mindful of my lane position. If I hadn’t paid attention and just relied on the car to do the work, I could have easily drifted into oncoming traffic without realizing it.
It’s important to remember that driver assistance features are just that: assistants. They’re designed to make our driving experiences safer and easier, but they’re not fool-proof. As technology advances, these features will undoubtably advance as well, but we’re far from a point where we can hop in a car and ask it to drive us to our destination itself.
You may have heard of recent events involving Tesla, which serves as a pretty convincing example of the risks involved with these types of features. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has linked Tesla’s Autopilot system to hundreds of incidents and 14 fatalities, raising concerns about driver inattention and inadequate safety measures. This has caused NHTSA to take a very close look at Tesla’s efforts to fix the software responsible for these incidents and whether it’s possible to prevent future crashes. Despite its name, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system doesn’t make a car fully autonomous and still requires drivers to pay attention to the road.
Another example of this type of emerging technology is Ford’s BlueCruise system. Ford claims it operates on 97% of controlled-access highways across the U.S. and Canada. The system deploys features such as adaptive cruise control, automatic lane change and a driver-monitoring system to allow for hands-free driving. A driver-facing camera is supposed to alert drivers if they stop paying attention to the road, even if for only a few seconds, according to Ford’s website.
Now, I’m certainly not saying we shouldn’t be using driver assistance features--I think they can be super helpful and in some cases, life-saving. Personally, on that recent drive from Indianapolis to Cleveland, I learned an important lesson. I’m grateful for the technology that makes my long trips less tiring, but it’s even more clear to me now that these features aren’t a substitute for defensive driving. Technology provides tools that we can use to enhance our driving experience, but ultimately, the driver is the one responsible for keeping themselves and those around them safe on the road, not the car.
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