A collection of 26 posts

Recently, one of Uber's autonomous automobiles was involved in an accident where a pedestrian was killed. What lesson should we learn from this incident? The potential for autonomous vehicles to produce tremendous saving of lives and injuries while increasing our quality of life provides strong s...

Fully autonomous vehicles? Programmed to be safe, not to crash into me? Hey!  I can ignore it. Drive or walk the street in front of it, regardless of traffic lights.  Deliberately stand in

I am pleased to say that my paper with Steve Casner and Ed Hutchins, The Challenges of Partially Automated Driving, has been published in the Communications of the ACM. The creation of most-automated vehicles provides major challenges for us. For a long time I( have argued that the most dangerous...

Chunka Mui wrote to say he was writing an article on autonomous cars and asked for my thoughts.  He published his article in Forbes , and before I knew it, I was suddenly front

My Op-Ed piece for the San Diego Union-Tribune for September 26, 2015. ... Ready for cars with computers as driver? No? Good, because the computers aren't ready either. But have no doubt, they are coming. ... The tremendous saving of lives and injuries is strong support for the development of aut...

I have long argued that we need to go slow with automation in the automobile. There were still too many unsolved problems. I have now changed my mind. Why? Because there are far more problems with the increasing number of distractions for drivers, too many new devices, too many new temptations. I...

The technological requirements for self-driving cars are extremely complex, and although we are now able to succeed in a very high percentage of the situations, those last few percentages contain the most difficult, the most daunting challenges. As automation gets better and better, then the prob...

Whenever you see something labeled "smart" or "intelligent," be assured that it is actually rather stupid. It is time to for the designers and engineers of this coming automated world and take heed from the lessons learned over the years in the field of Human-Systems Integration, in studies of au...

Like many of you, I live in the 21st century, a time when society is recognizing the damage done to the environment through our inattention to the side effects of our technologies. But one specialized niche of the world still lives in the 20th century: those who write the automobile reviews for m...

I was interviewed by Neil Briscoe for an article in IrishTimes.com: Is the love affair about to end? "Are cars as we know them to become a thing of the past?" asks the article. Where is the room for "Driving passion"? The question, Briscoe points out, is whether we can continue to have single p...

Consider the modern automobile. It is a wonder of computation. multiple CPUs, hundreds of miles of cabling. Automatic this and automatic that. Lots of automatic stuff. How do we automate sensibly, controlling some parts of the driving experience, but ensuring that drivers are kept alert and infor...

Concept cars play an important role in the automobile industry. These exercises are great opportunities to test potential designs. Originally, these were pure explorations in style -- an excuse to let the stylists display their creative juices before returning to the mundane world of production m...

When I travel in cars, I am a passenger as often as I am a driver. Passengers seem poorly served by the design of most automobile interiors. Why not allow the front seat to face to the rear? Now, suddenly, the front and rear passengers are united. Will passengers dislike it? Suppose it were optio...

Let’s face it, the car isn’t just for driving anymore, it’s for almost anything you can imagine (and probably some things you’d rather not). As if the interior design team’s job weren’t difficult enough, not only must they make a safe, comfortable interior, but it must be alluring, in...

Drivers have dashboards. But what about the passengers, both in the front and rear seats? Why shouldn’t they too have dashboards? Today, we need places to store and plug in a wide variety of devices: music and video players, game machines and controllers, earphones, cellphones, and computer...

Today we can start the car with ease. But our intrepid automobile interior design teams have compensated for that simplicity. Now you have to learn how to open the doors, how to operate the temperature controls, how to change radio stations. We used to have to take classes to start the engine. To...