Ford Self-Driving Car News: Engineers Falling Asleep Behind the Wheel During Test Drives
As Ford Motors continues to develop its self-driving car technology, the American automaker has noticed that engineers monitoring the autonomous vehicles have been falling asleep behind the wheel — a discovery that could have significant real-world implications for the future of this particular segment.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Ford's product development chief Raj Nair said that they have tried to combat this occurrence by integrating bells, buzzers, warning lights, vibrating seats and shaking steering wheels. They even considered the addition of a second engineer. However, engineers still had a hard time maintaining "situational awareness."
"These are trained engineers who are there to observe what's happening. But it's human nature that you start trusting the vehicle more and more and that you feel you don't need to be paying attention," he explained.
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This particular scenario is what prompted the automaker to skip Level 3 automation and proceed to working on Level 4 automation.
Companies like Audi, General Motors, Nissan and Honda are said to be developing Level 3 automation called "conditional automation," wherein the automated driving system will take control of the car but will hand over control of the vehicle to the human driver when faced with complex situations, like when an accident is imminent.
These automakers are considering giving drivers a 10- to 30-second warning to prepare them for the hand-off. This is said to be enough time to rouse a driver from sleep. Nevertheless, this setup remains to be the biggest challenge of Level 3 automation.
On the other hand, like Google's Waymo and Volvo, Ford is intent on Level 4 automation, "high automation," wherein all aspects of driving is controlled by the automated driving system. It can circumvent certain situations if a driver is not able to respond to a request to intervene. As such, Ford's self-driving car will have no steering wheel, brake and gas pedals.
In a previous interview with Business Insider, Ford CEO Mark Fields explained that they found it difficult to determine when exactly is the right and responsible time for the autonomous vehicle technology to hand off control of the vehicle to the driver.
"Going to Level 4 is really important because it really pushes us to really think through how do we make sure this is safe, efficient, and acceptable for consumers," the executive said.
Ford's self-driving car is expected to launch sometime in 2021.
