Researchers and governments have long wondered how self-driving cars – automated driving – could change the world. If you could do something else while stuck in traffic, would you change the way you use your car? Would you want to stay further away from work? Alternatively, could the advent of shared self-driving cars motivate you to ditch your personal vehicle for a shared Uber, making travel more efficient?
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Self-driving cars have not yet been released, and will likely be widely launched in many years or decades as the technology is still developing.
But Scott Hardman thinks he has found a way to look into the future. He is a researcher at the UC Davis Institute for Transportation Studies who studies how people respond to new fuels and travel technologies. If you want to know how people will travel a decade from now, he thinks it is useful to study the partially automated car features on the market now, such as Tesla’s Autopilot.
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Autopilot, along with General Motors' Super Cruise, Nissan's ProPilot Assist, BMW's Driving Assistant, and Ford's Co-pilot 360, are advanced driver-assist features. These new systems won't drive your vehicle, but they will help you drive better. Two important caveats: Most of the systems were designed to work on relatively simple highways. And the person behind the wheel needs to be paying attention and ready to take control of the car.
In a 2020 paper, Hardman interviewed 35 people who owned a Tesla with Autopilot and found that most believed the automated feature made driving less bad. “Drivers find that this system takes a lot of the stress out of driving, so they feel more relaxed, less tired, less stressed,” Hardman says. “It reduces the cognitive load of driving.”
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In new research released this month, Hardman and postdoctoral researcher Debapriya Chakraborty report that less stressful driving leads to a natural conclusion: more driving. Using data from a survey of 630 Tesla owners, with and without Autopilot, the researchers found that owners of vehicles with partial automation drive an average of 4,888 more miles per year than owners of vehicles without the feature.
Source of information: wired.com
