Today, carmakers offer a number of assistance systems in their cars to improve driving safety in the event that the driver is distracted. However, according to a new study by the American Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), the opposite is true – drivers of cars equipped with assistance systems pay even less attention.
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A team of researchers recruited 20 volunteers from the US state of Massachusetts. He lent half of the Range Rover Evoque with adaptive cruise control, the other half with a Volvo S90 equipped with both adaptive cruise control and Pilot Assist, an active guidance assistant in the middle of the lane.
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Volvo S90 (Illustrative photo)
Photo: Volvo
At the end of the monthly experiment, the volunteers drove normally, but at the end of the test, the likelihood that they would turn their attention to something else while driving while the assistance systems were in operation increased significantly. For example, infotainment or smartphone.
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“We have more than doubled the likelihood that drivers will show signs of detachment from traffic monitoring after a month of using Pilot Assist. After getting acquainted with the technology and finding out how it works, the probability of dropping the steering wheel with both hands is more than twelve times that of driving without assistants, ”said Ian Reagan, the study’s lead author.
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Range Rover Evoque P300e PHEV (Illustrative photo)
Photo: Land Rover
Paradoxically, however, if Volvo drivers used only adaptive cruise control, the likelihood that they would stop driving was less than driving without assistants. However, with the availability of Pilot Assist, only four out of ten drivers used adaptive cruise control only.
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Drivers of evoqs equipped with only adaptive cruise control were more likely to use a smartphone while driving when cruise control was on compared to driving without it. This tendency has increased over time. What did not grow, however, was the degree of such manipulation of the smartphone, which is known to increase the risk of a collision – such as writing an SMS.
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These systems fall at most into autonomous driving level 2, where the car relies on the driver as a safety net. The systems can be switched off at any time and the car can be handed over to the person if he does not know the advice – which is why the driver must always pay attention to the road.
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However, we do not learn a relatively important thing, namely how the systems in the wolves or evoques let the drivers know that they are switching off. Some cars just change the color of the icon in the instrument panel, which is easily overlooked by the driver watching the road. Others flash most of the instrument panel or even the lights in the steering wheel, and others ring or whistle.
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Illustration of the operation of the assisted steering in the BMW M850i. At the BMW brand, these systems report to the driver’s attention with unmistakable lights in the steering wheel arms.
Photo: Jiří Landa
Of course, the probability that the car will not know how to drive advice varies from place to place. In the city in bad weather it is relatively high, on the contrary on a dry highway without sharp backlight relatively low. The IIHS website does not describe in which environments the driver is more likely to stop driving and in which they are not.
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However, the study does not mention any accident that volunteers could get into in any type of car. This may mean that there was none and therefore the distraction is not as serious as the study tries to claim.
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Nevertheless, the IIHS warning is meaningless: “Accident investigators have identified distractions as an important factor in fatal accidents involving driving assistance systems,” Reagan concludes.
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