You're Not Wrong, People Are Absolutely Getting Worse At Driving

“If you train them to think that paying attention means nudging the steering wheel every few seconds, then that’s exactly what they’ll do,” says IIHS President David Harkey.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) led a three-year study that found drivers are far too distracted while partial automation systems, like Tesla’s Autopilot, Volvo’s Pilot Assist, or others are engaged. Drivers learned to skirt warnings, engaging in behaviors like eating, texting, and more.

The study, conducted alongside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLab, shows drivers’ “tendency to multitask also increased over time for some drivers as they grew more comfortable with the technology, while others were more distracted while using the system from the start.”

Tesla Autopilot users “quickly mastered” timing the intervals for its alert reminders, intervening to prevent an escalation that would eventually shut the system off for a while. The IIHS suggests more robust alerts and monitoring are needed to curb this, as drivers were much more likely to engage in activities like eating, grooming, and using phones or other electronics while systems were active than not.

“These results show that escalating, multimodal attention reminders are very effective in getting drivers to change their behavior,” said IIHS Senior Research Scientist Alexandra Mueller, the study’s lead author. “However, better safeguards are needed to ensure that the behavior change actually translates to more attentive driving.” If you’d like to read more specifics on the IIHS’s study and the methods used to arrive at its findings, you can read the whole brief here.

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