Smarter Cars Paving the Way for Robot Vehicles

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An oblivious pedestrian steps in front of the car, and it halts itself before the driver reacts. Sensors continually scan the road ahead, and the car adjusts to maintain a safe distance from the vehicle in front. If it starts drifting out of its lane, a warning tone sounds and the car rights itself. Other vehicles approach in the driver’s blind spot, and the car “sees” them. And it can maneuver itself into a parking space.

It sounds like the forthcoming generation of autonomous cars.

But these advanced driver-assistance features increasingly are embedded in cars you can find parked in dealers’ lots. Luxury makers such as Tesla and Mercedes-Benz began including them a few years ago, but now they have trickled down to many mass-market models, sometimes as options, sometimes standard.

Smart cars packed with sensors and algorithms — with the ability to take control from the driver in critical situations — will help prepare consumers for the advent of autonomous cars, experts said. And it’s not just new buyers who will gain an education. A barrage of TV commercials is drumming home the benefits of driver-assistance features.

“This should help people get more and more comfortable with really advanced stuff like [full] autonomy,” said Nidhi Kalra, senior information scientist at nonpartisan think tank Rand Corp. and director of Rand San Francisco.

Karen Baumer, a linguist who lives in San Francisco, doesn’t know much about the technology behind autonomous cars. But after her partner got a Tesla, “it didn’t take long for me to feel like this car drives better than I do in most situations, and better than most other drivers.”

Now, she finds it frustrating “to read comments from people who have no experience [with driver-assistance features] and feel they are dangerous or scary, when they are demonstrably safer than human drivers.”

Most people don’t want a robot to drive them around, polls say — but those questions largely are posed in the absence of firsthand knowledge.

Kelley Blue Book surveyed 2,264 Americans last year and found most wary about giving up control of their cars, even if autonomy is safer. However, it was a different story among respondents who had cars with semiautonomous features.

“For people who experienced any level of driver assistance — lane keeping, smart cruise control — their comfort with autonomous vehicles shot way up,” said Karl Brauer, executive publisher of Kelley Blue Book and Auto Trader. “It’s way higher by having a little bit of exposure.”

The lesson, he said: “It’s in the best interest of the car companies to make people aware of what’s already being done with cars and what can be done.”

Hence Toyota’s commercials humorously show crash-test dummies realizing they’re out of work. That’s because, Toyota argues, its new cars are made safer by features such as pedestrian detection, lane-departure alert, automatic high beams and dynamic cruise control.

“We’ve had these types of systems in very small volume for over a decade in cars like the high-grade Sienna, fully loaded, top of the line,” said Nathaniel Molgren, a Toyota senior planner. “But now we are making the systems standard on all grades.” They are also standard on Toyota’s high-end Lexus line.

Toyota Safety Sense, as the package of features is called, will be in 81% of all Toyota models by year end. It adds about $350 to $600 to the price.

The reason? “Safety is one of the most important factors [for] consumers when choosing a vehicle,” Molgren said. “We’re focusing on the three most common causes of accidents: frontal collision, unintended lane departure and night visibility.”

Drivers can adjust the features’ sensitivity, or even turn them off. Toyota sees it as almost a virtuous cycle. “The more consumers understand about autonomous features in vehicles today, the more comfortable they will be as more features are introduced and ultimately [cars become] fully autonomous,” Molgren said.

Honda Sensing, an optional package that includes lane keeping, adaptive cruise control and forward collision warning, has been around since 2014. In past years, about a fifth of customers opted for the $1,000 add-on.

But so far this year, 38% of Honda customers have bought the semiautonomous features, Honda North America spokesman Marcos Frommer said.

“When people first try out something like adaptive cruise control [which adjusts based on the speed of the vehicle ahead], they are shocked at how advanced it is,” he said. “We believe [advanced driver-assistance] systems offer a technical and perceptional bridge to the more highly automated vehicles of the future.”

Con Byrnes, general sales manager at Honda of Oakland, said the most avid consumers for Honda Sensing are people who have been in accidents or are buying their teen’s first car. “They want that extra safety and want their kids protected,” he said. Many of them come to the dealership already familiar with the features from online research.

Jim Schott’s 15-mile commute down Interstate 280 from Menlo Park to Cupertino is much more pleasant thanks to the adaptive cruise control on his Mazda 6, he said. He bought the sports sedan with Grand Touring features in 2014. That made him an early adopter for capabilities such as lane-departure warnings, high-speed indications and pedestrian avoidance.

“It took a few weeks to really trust it and know the edges and quirks,” said Schott, a channel marketing manager at a networking company. “But I believe it is more responsive and faster than I am. If someone cuts me off, the car reacts before I do.”

Thanks to his experience, “I can imagine in a few years all the [autonomous] cars driving 4 feet apart and talking to the cars ahead and behind to coordinate traffic,” he said.

That’s exactly the psychological trajectory that experts say these features will create.

“As these advanced driver-assistance systems find their way into all different types of cars, not just the very high-end ones, humans will get more used to the idea that we need help with driving tasks,” said Elliot Katz, a San Francisco attorney who specializes in the law around autonomous vehicles.

When drivers experience situations such as their car telling them to slam on their brakes because a car four cars ahead has done so, “they will start to realize how humans are inherently more limited than this automated technology,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before people realize, ‘Whoa, it’s actually much safer for us not to be in the control of the vehicle.’ ”

However, for all the bells and whistles now being embedded in cars, it’s important to remember that they cannot actually drive themselves.

That can create a conundrum. “These technologies may make up for our already lagging attention behind the wheel, but they may also exacerbate it by inviting us to be inattentive,” Kalra said.

One stark lesson was driven home by last year’s fatal crash of a Tesla operating in Autopilot mode while the driver watched a video. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found the crash was the fault of the driver, not the car.

Experts say that was a wake-up call for other consumers to understand the limitations of current driver-assistance features.

And the administration’s report also validated the benefits, finding that cars equipped with Tesla’s Autopilot had 40% fewer accidents than those without it.

Some driver-assistance technologies aren’t all that new. Anti-lock braking systems, which pulse the brakes 1,000 times a second if the driver hits them too hard in slippery conditions, were introduced in the 1960s, Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons said. “We didn’t identify that feature at the time as semiautonomous, but it was the car assisting the driver using its own knowledge,” he said. Cruise control, automatic headlights and automatic windshield wipers have likewise been around for years.

“Over time, there will be growing acceptance” of autonomy, said Missy Cummings, head of Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Lab, aided by the integration of driver-assist features. “People won’t be forced to deal with driverless cars overnight.”

In other words: Robot cars may not seem like science fiction when they arrive. Because their building blocks are on the road today.