Our Future in the Driver s Seat

Transcription

1 February 14, 2014 * Page 1 of 7 The NAViSection System: Uniting the Champions of Safe Driving Somebody is discussing the end of driving with their mother or father today. At the same time, a national discussion is brewing on whether or not people should still be driving cars period. This partly reflects how an individual decision, when unchecked, becomes a national concern. I just think the most difficult thing to displace is privilege. Sir Sean Connery Our Future in the Driver s Seat The driver s seat of a car provides a strong sense of freedom. That freedom also brings some degree of fear due to over 30,000 fatalities in the US each year. With 80+ deaths each day, teen and older drivers are nine times more likely to be involved. In essence, there are two phases in life (see Figure 1) when drivers are 1) lacking experience or 2) declining in capability. Figure 1: The Decades between Licensing and Driver Capability for Teen and Older Drivers Teen drivers are licensed at a rate of 3 million per year through a training system concluding in 15 minutes or less of testing. Over 22 million people with a valid license today are 70 years or older, but few processes are in place preparing them to retire their driving privilege. Articles from the AARP have also highlighted that people will be outliving their driving capability from seven to ten years. No institution or agency monitors license holders regarding driving capability, so the management of driving privilege is linked to vehicle registration, insurance, and traffic tickets or citations. The system values financial means over driving capability, and licensing policies focus heavily on age.

2 February 14, 2014 * Page 2 of 7 Now, human driving capability is overshadowed by the performance of machines proven greater than humans. Your mind will imagine pictures of the Google Self Driving Car boasting fewer (or zero) accidents per miles driven and braking performance surpassing professional drivers. The vision to fully adopt driverless cars builds off of stages in technological advancement from the driver alert, to driver assist, and finally driver switch (driverless cars). We the people are not out of the equation yet, but it looks like we should hurry to understand how an activity like driving may now be considered a task for car-shaped robots. Figure 2: The Vision to Unite our Champions of Safe Driving The root cause of the individual and national driving issue involves disconnects among our champions of safe driving. In Figure 2, the goal of safe driving is pursued by professionals in different fields, but the methods and motivations are not the same. Provided a healthy, robust road infrastructure, safe driving is a balance between vehicle safety and driver capability. Emerging technologies from the automotive industry have far outpaced advancements in driver safety education and training. The reduced attention to driver training over time led to the present day situation, where 93% of all collisions are attributed to human error.

3 February 14, 2014 * Page 3 of 7 A novel methodology has been proposed to integrate the strengths from vehicle technology into the standard of practice for driver education. NAViSection is a methodology to modernize driver licensing policy in the era of intelligent vehicles. Uniting the Champions of Safe Driving The NAViSection System is an innovation that introduces testing of automated vehicle safety systems to driver evaluation. Imagine folding Figure 2 upon itself lengthwise as a symbolic visual for uniting our champions of safe driving. Activities to validate vehicle safety advancements and driver training enhancements would take place in the same space. As the driving program facilitates driver training, any errors a driver commits will inform potential crash scenarios that intelligent vehicles should prevent. When considering the crash risk for teen and older drivers, intelligent vehicles should detect a continuum in driver performance enabling technology to meet us at our level of need. The degrees of automated driving could then adapt to our daily performance through the alerts, assists, and switch to fully automated service. Similarly, driving instructors and evaluators provide the full spectrum of protection from a hint, to a little help, and all the way to a handover when people are learning to drive or reviewing their driving capability due to medical impairments. As vehicles with collision avoidance technologies (i.e. steering assist or braking assist) are deployed as evaluation vehicles in driving programs, the partnership will result in vehicle testing services as a byproduct of driver training, testing and evaluation.

4 February 14, 2014 * Page 4 of 7 Figure 3: The Data Measured by the NAViSection System during On-Road Evaluation The NAViSection System was developed as an integrated technology for driving programs to collect measures on driver capability (see Figure 3) and reinforce licensing recommendations. Three forms of assistance (steering, braking, and vocal cues or prompts) reflect the events of greatest importance to driving evaluators when students or clients commit a driving error. Using the NAViSection System, driving evaluators are able to document when a student or client relied on assistance (collision avoidance) provided during a driving session. Each event, in turn, informs how to segment the vehicle data available for analysis by the automotive manufacturer. Additional providers of aftermarket data recorders may also be welcomed into the effort, and may enable extended monitoring of driving capability by association of the data to crash critical events. The correlation between data and events will then illustrate how driving errors unfold across all levels of automated driving (alert, assist, and switch). In 2013, a pilot demonstration of the NAViSection System showed that evaluator assistance is not a rare event within driver rehabilitation and potentially provides a higher frequency of incidents as compared to naturalistic driving studies. The predictive value of evaluator assistance on the road is well above the medical or driving history of a client to the driving program.

5 February 14, 2014 * Page 5 of 7 During commercialization, the system is projected to cost a one-time vehicle upgrade expense ($1,000) with a software license ($100/month) for use of custom report generation tools and integration of data sets across multiple vehicle data recorders in support of data visualization and training. Navity is a venture formed to lead this effort and modernize driver education. Opportunities Built Upon the NAViSection System As a platform technology, the NAViSection System enables a sustainable program of data collection from crash critical events. Driving programs simply need an infrastructure-level upgrade to their evaluation vehicles in order to affect major opportunities in collaboration with the automotive, telematics, and auto insurance industries. Testing the Automotive Technologies The major benefit for automotive testing is an opportunity to validate advanced safety systems without liability. Having the safety system running as a simulation would confine the liability to the driving program in the rare event of a crash. Additionally, the automotive partner to the driving program would not have to pay for recruitment of test driving subjects or employee salaries for test drivers on retainer. In comparison to the Google methodology of competing man vs. machine, the NAViSection presents competition of evaluator vs. machine and harmonizes the attitudes between people and automated vehicles. To further alleviate the fear of robo cars, the NAViSection method allows automotive manufactures to associate their safety systems with the trust placed in driving instructors. The marketing opportunity is to claim that their safety feature is like always having a driving instructor in the car to keep your family safe everywhere you go. Learning with Telematics Products The telematics industry will play a significant role until the automated vehicle safety features become pervasive in society. During this time, driving programs should utilize vehicle data in the curriculum of driver safety education. Naturally, any data collected during training sessions could be shared with parents or any approved individual fulfilling supervised training requirements under graduated driver licensing laws. Ultimately, an evaluation vehicle with data recorders, cameras and connected vehicle capabilities may even be able to author new driving simulator scenarios based on driving errors observed in real life.

6 February 14, 2014 * Page 6 of 7 Drivers that adopt telematics solutions demonstrated within driving programs can also receive customized training content specific to their personal areas of weakness. Driver remediation programs and courses offered by AARP and AAA would greatly serve their customers by reducing mandatory course content given recorded evidence of driving capability related to course topics. Special programs could then extend a data screening service for families helping a loved one decide when to retire their driving privileges. Alternatively, family physicians and specialists may value an opportunity to screen for driver capability before engaging the medical advisory board of the state licensing authority due to mandatory physician reporting policies. Revising Auto Insurance Offerings Auto insurance companies are already invested in a massive data experiment under the trend of user-based insurance. The affiliation of telematics solutions with the insurance companies has many drivers concerned about privacy and a fear of big brother. An alternative would be that all drivers who adopt the use of vehicle data recorders receive a base discount. The arrangement would be that they must opt-in to share their data with insurance providers by entering demographic information in exchange for remaining anonymous. This would alleviate the privacy concerns and support a culture of driver capability monitoring. Extrapolating this possibility further, there may be an opportunity for auto insurance providers to offer competitive policy pricing for emerging drivers. While teens are typically added directly to their existing family policy, competitive pricing based on sustained driver monitoring data could prompt a conversion of a young adult and perhaps the entire family of lower-risk drivers. In order to maintain anonymous tracking of driving data, Navity could take on an additional role as a third party marketing arm on behalf of insurance companies willing to offer competitive policy pricing to the account holder associated with superior, safe driving data.

7 February 14, 2014 * Page 7 of 7 Steering Attention Towards Mobility Can more sophisticated biometrics & testing combined with more sophisticated vehicles and roadways lead to extended and flexible licensing for the elderly and enhance safety of elderly drivers at the same time? Dr. Martin Wachs Rand Corporation & University of California Mobility is a critical aspect of life as we learn, work, socialize, and live together. Driving has been the dominant focus among people to maximize their freedom and travel satisfaction. As conditions change over our lifetime, we should look to vehicle technologies to be a wind sock indicating the status of our driving capability. Embracing this feedback may allow us to branch out to other modes of mobility when our driving capability could be called into question. The total adoption approach for fully automated driving fails to support individuals, and our nation, in the delicate decision of when it is time to retire our driving privileges. The future of automated cars, vehicle sharing, and livable cities will certainly impact the necessity of driving. In response, a vision should be adopted to support people for as long as they are safe drivers of intelligent vehicles. The key is to incorporate vehicle data into the licensing policies for teen and older drivers or any high-risk populations. Quantified driving evaluation can relieve the concerns of driving privilege as policies focus less on age and drivers embrace the assistance of automated vehicles.