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