
On November 25, 2019 the National Transportation Safety Board issued its final report on the March 2018 fatality accident in Tempe, Arizona, involving an autonomous vehicle and a pedestrian. NTSB’s position on the accident is that it came about because of a combination of an “inadequate safety culture” at the developer and “automation complacency,” which it describes as the failure of the human safety driver to “monitor an automation system for its failures.”
It doesn’t take a deep dive into news reports about AVs to see that many developers envision AVs as systems in which vehicle occupants are entirely “automation complacent”—watching movies, playing video games, doing business or otherwise ignoring the outside world. Everybody from BMW to IKEA has presented concepts for AV interiors, involving everything from social media feeds or e-mails on vehicle windows to projections of movies or video games on the windshield. Add in noise-cancellation technology, lighting and temperature control (not to mention alcohol) and the AV is designed to induce “complacency,” exactly what NTSB criticized in this accident as well as the Tesla Autopilot crashes in Florida and Culver City, California: “driver inattention and overreliance on vehicle automation.” As Hamlet reminds us, “there’s the rub.”
Continue Reading The NTSB and “Automation Complacency”