Are Our Cars Making Us Lazy?

Automated systems are ubiquitous in today's high-tech autos. Some are essential, others not so much.
By Sam Foley of MSN Autos

While automated features are nothing new on the automotive landscape, some believe we have gone too far, too fast.


In 1940, the now defunct American carmaker Packard introduced its ultraluxurious 180 Series touring sedan with a minuscule feature that would change the automotive landscape forever. The company outfitted the posh 4-door with powered windows rather than a standard crank-driven system - push a button, the window went down; push it again, the window went up.


This feature was a marvel of engineering. It was also probably the first completely frivolous auto amenity. But more importantly, it sparked the development of hundreds of automated systems - electromechanical or, more recently, digital - designed to handle tasks that motorists could otherwise do for themselves.


By the mid-1940s, power windows were everywhere, next seen on Ford Lincoln Custom limousines, then shortly after in Cadillacs, followed by Buicks and so on. Before the end of the decade, power seats made their debut, and power steering arrived in the early 1950s.


In 1957, Cadillac introduced the most automated automobile of its time: the Brougham. A limited-edition version of the Cadillac Eldorado, the Brougham was designed to be the most luxurious car in the world. It was assembled by hand; came with slick, rear-facing "suicide" doors; and had a list of "world first" features, such as an automatic starter, a transistor radio, memory seats and a trunk that opened and closed with the push of a button.


While the Brougham's feature list was impressive, it left many driving purists wondering: Are all of these technologies designed to make driving more pleasurable really necessary, or are they just making us lazier drivers? This sentiment is gaining momentum once again in today's high-tech automotive world - and not just from driving enthusiasts.


The downside of Automation
As incredible as the Brougham was back in the day, modern vehicles such as the Lexus LS 460 put it to shame in terms of available high-tech bells and whistles. An optioned-up LS 460 can have rain-sensing automatic wipers, an auto-closing trunk lid, auto-adjusting high beams, power windows and sunshades, power door closures, a voice-controlled GPS navigation system, an electronically controlled braking system that overrides simultaneous gas- and brake-pedal application, and an automated system that will parallel-park the car for you.


These features are not just the province of the luxury-vehicle segment anymore. The 2011 Chrysler Town & Country minivan can be outfitted with a power liftgate, dual power side doors and power-folding third-row seats, as well as the usual complement of power front seats, power mirrors and electrochromic dimming mirrors. Push all the buttons at once, and the vehicle's dozens of motors whir and buzz in a battery-straining ballet, letting the kids spill out the sides unsupervised while the groceries dump out the back and into the driveway.


While all of these features are meant to be helping hands, their benefits often blind motorists to their drawbacks. And it's definitely worth considering exactly what all this automation is doing to us as drivers.


As it turns out, automated systems can cause some pretty distressing problems. For instance, power windows have long been recognized as a child safety hazard. A 2004 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study estimated that power windows killed an average of five children per year. Regulators have now required that all vehicles from the 2008 model year forward use automatic window controls that are less likely to be triggered by children.


And there is a cultural issue at stake as well: the loss of skills that occurs when humans voluntarily abdicate responsibility to machines. Consider the breakdown of navigational skills due to our reliance on GPS devices. Many people no longer pay attention to landmarks and other geographic indicators as they drive, and the skill of map reading is fading as well.


Even some proven safety systems have drawbacks. Performance-driving enthusiasts have long held a low opinion of stability-control systems. They believe that because the technology saves bad drivers from their own mistakes, they are more likely to drive beyond their abilities.


"The performance community is always going to have a backlash against technology; that's just their personality," says Christopher Nowakowski, a human factors researcher at California PATH at the University of California at Berkeley. Nowakowski allows that crash data suggest that stability control does save lives. Nevertheless, he says the data don't measure the influence of sloppy, overconfident drivers on other people's accidents.


The Lexus LS 460 can can be outfitted with rain-sensing automatic wipers, an auto-closing trunk lid, power door closers, a voice-controlled GPS navigation system, and an automated system that will literally parallel-park the car for you.


Driving on Faith
Nowakowski is keenly aware of how automated driving is becoming, and of the impact of technology on human behavior. "These types of systems can be beneficial, but the more automation you have, the more you can lull people into a false sense of security," he says. And research done by California PATH shows that drivers are willing to invest a surprising amount of faith in automated systems.


Nowakowski and his colleagues tested a highly sophisticated Nissan adaptive system that used both lidar (light detection and ranging) and vehicle-to-vehicle wireless communication to allow one car to follow another at surprisingly tight distances. "We're told that we're supposed to keep two seconds of distance between us and the car in front of us at highway speeds," he says, "but no one really does that; the gap is closer to 1.6 seconds for most drivers. But with this system, we found that people were perfectly willing to accept the vehicle following the car ahead of it with only a 0.6-second gap."


Human Handlers
Advanced automotive automation technologies aren't just cruising around on academic test tracks. Earlier this year, Google researchers began driving fully autonomous cars on public roads to test the real-world readiness of the technology. The cars had human handlers at the wheel to make sure that none of their vehicles' mistakes turned lethal, and by all accounts, the vehicles performed well. Nevertheless, researchers such as Nowakowski have concerns about what could happen if such technology is commercialized.


"As you start to get vehicles that are highly automated, ones that can steer themselves and maintain speed and make turning decisions, what are you doing as a driver?" he asks. "Obviously you're going to start texting and doing whatever will keep your attention level up, because you don't want to just sit there and watch what the car's doing. We know this is a problem with airline pilots that have highly automated planes, and their job is to sit there for eight hours and watch a bunch of numbers that don't move; we know they don't do this very well." (This phenomenon was made tragically clear in February 2009, when the sleep-deprived pilot of Colgan Air Flight 3407 failed to react to the signs of icing on his plane while it was on autopilot. The resulting crash killed all 49 people abroad.)


Plus, as anyone who's ever seen his computer unexpectedly freeze knows that technology is only as good as the people who make it. This was shown spectacularly at a press demonstration of Volvo's pedestrian-avoidance technology earlier this year. The system is designed to apply full braking power automatically whenever an equipped vehicle's camera and radar sensors detect a pedestrian. Unfortunately, the system apparently didn't like the Swedish automaker's test dummies, as it plowed right into them in three out of 12 test runs. The company claimed that the dummies weren't set up properly. Obviously, such a system is meant as a fail-safe to human judgement and reaction, but it served as a compelling demonstration that, no matter how sophisticated the automation technology, if you act like a dummy, someone's probably going to get hurt.