I am driving with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised). As I approach, the steering wheel seems to be freaking out, moving back-and-forth quickly. The car’s apparent freak out causes me to freak out.
After a few turns like this, I realize what’s happening: the car is making micro adjustments during the turn.
A human doesn’t make those micro adjustments. We wouldn’t be capable of fine tuning that rapidly. We don’t have to be perfect, we just need to get where we are going. If we’re a little bit off the center arc of our turn, that’s fine.
It would have been a more comfortable experience if the car just smoothed out those micro adjustments. They would still be done, but anything that was tiny wouldn’t provide feedback via the steering wheel.
This is similar to when anti-lock brakes came out on cars. The long-time advice in driver’s ed class was that you should slowly pulse the brakes to avoid going into a skid. With ABS, it is different. You should stomp on the brakes. The ABS then pulses the brakes faster and with more control than a user could. As with the Tesla steering wheel, the brake pedal provided vibrating feedback – not a comforting user experience.
I was in a Waymo the other day. Because the ride was so comfortable, I sat back and enjoyed the conversation with my friend. That was interrupted by a “click-click, click-click, click-click.” The car was indicating that it was about to make a turn. The signal action is very useful information for the cars and pedestrians around it. The clicking is useful for human drivers. It isn’t useful or necessary for passengers in a self-driving car. (In the transition period, the clicking might make passengers more comfortable. Perhaps it could be a preference setting.)
We are going through a major transition in transportation. As we design the new experiences, we need to be cognizant of:
- What makes drivers more comfortable in a semi-autonomous environment? (L2/L3)
- What makes passengers comfortable in an autonomous environment? (L4/L5)
- What is vestigial that we can remove to create a better experience for both? (L3-L5)
- How does the vehicle interact with the overall environment? (L3-L5)
We need to be looking at what we need to do during the transition as well as in the ideal future state.
You could have electrochroamatic glass that provides privacy to occupants. If the car is self-driving, you don’t really need to look out, do you?
One of my really future state ideas is auto-off headlights in autonomous environments. It’s the opposite of auto high-beams. When there is no one or no moving objects nearby, turn off the headlights and noisemakers to reduce light and sound pollution.
Of course all of this involves navigating a complex regulatory landscape that can vary by city, state and country. For the U.S., I’d like to see federal preemption. That might take a while. In California, cities like San Francisco, don’t even want state preemption.
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