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Comment by 1337shadow | Hacker News Reader

> Humans aren't designed to monitor something that requires no action for a long time and then suddenly requires attention

Isn't that exactly the definition of cruise control ?

I'm sorry but I won't be driving a car without cruise control anymore: cruise control saves oil and is much more comfortable.

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Cruise control doesn't require you to drop your attention to driving. It simply relieves you of the need to keep your foot on a pedal.

Cruise control + lane keeping perhaps. Which is why I think lane-centering driving assists are dangerous and the limit should be lane-leaving warnings (buzz in steering wheel when close to lane edge - no steeeing to follow lane).

BMW has a good middle ground, resistance increases if you go to the edge of the lane and if you almost touch the lines the wheel vibrates. That means you're still consciously steering but it's easier because the car has a tendency to follow the lanes just as any wheel has a tendency to return to center after a turn. But if you let go of the wheel it wouldn't keep a lane.

Makes sense. Making these systems behave well doesn’t seem so hard if it’s starting from the correct principle: never encourage the driver to not drive the vehicle. Assist, but don’t take over.

With cruise control you’re still very much the one who is driving and paying attention.

Ok, I can't imagine myself dropping attention from driving. As a member of a national roadkill prevention awareness org and having lost close friends on the road: I would never had imagined that it would require you to drop attention.

I imagined it was something you could enable and then disable by just breaking like cruise control or auto parking with toyotas.

But now I see how complex it becomes because of the wheel, even tesla owners in the comments of the article don't like to let their hands off the wheel.

The more automated cars become, the more drivers will start to trust them and pay less attention - especially when it’s advertised as full self driving.

Prime example would be the Uber test driver who felt she could trust the car enough to watch a TV show on her phone, when she was supposed to be supervising it.

Plus our attention naturally just starts to wander when the talk at hand is not that engaging.

My understanding was that she was looking on a dashboard screen slightly before crashing into the bicyclist, not a cellphone?

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