Huffington Magazine Issue 68 | Page 42

HUFFINGTON 09.29.13 DRIVER ON BOARD BIANCA BOSKER Above: A view from behind the wheel of Stanford University’s driving simulator. Right: A researcher navigates the simulator at Stanford’s automotive research lab. traffic. But one of the biggest impediments remains the very thing that motivated the quest for selfdriving cars in the first place: the limits of human abilities. Psychologists, engineers and cognitive scientists are now probing how humans interact with such cars, cognizant that these realities must shape how the systems operate. “The greatest challenge to having highly automated vehicles is not technological,” observes Richard Wallace, a director at the Center for Automotive Research, a non-profit research organization. “It’s handling the transition when humans must take back control of the vehicle.” Inside a dark room at Stanford University’s automotive research lab sits a four-week-old, $600,000 driving simulator that will be one of the first used to study how drivers trade duties with their self-driving cars and