The commute to work is getting almost as complicated as flying an airplane – many higher-end cars even have more computing power than a commercial jet. And yet, drivers often don't have the luxury of a co-pilot to take over navigation, music and other electronics, not to mention social media or telephone calls. While these features are supposed to add convenience and entertainment, they also make it easy for motorists to lose concentration on the most important task – the driving.
Fortunately, car makers and other companies are aware of the dangers and are looking into making life easier and safer in the driver's seat. Not only are they inventing new features, but some are changing the way we interact with our car.
Denso International develops systems for the auto industry, and many of its products are already in vehicles. At the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, it has a simulated car cockpit to demonstrate new warning and safety systems that could reach the road some day.
Pat Bassett, vice-president of Denso's North American research and engineering centre, is part of a team that helps develop the human-machine interface (HMI) – basically the mechanicals of how people interact with their cars, and vice versa.
"With the HMI," he says, "there are so many inputs coming to the driver now, electronics and cellphones, we want to make sure the driver can understand and comprehend everything that's coming into him. So we want to make it intuitive without the driver taking their eyes off the road. Our main point is driver distraction and how to eliminate that."
His company is not alone in this. Denso is part of a consortium, along with MIT, Honda, Subaru and Jaguar Land Rover, researching driver distractions. "The goal is to measure attentiveness," he says. "We want to come up with some standardized way to measure distraction and attentiveness in an everyday car.
"That also comes into play when you talk about autonomous cars. At Level 3 area, which means the car will take over a little bit but the driver will have to come back in and take control in certain situations, we need to have a way to measure how engaged a driver is or not."
One of the more spectacular real-world innovations in HMI on the Detroit floor can be found inside the BMW 7 Series. A mere wave of a finger in the air can operate the volume, answer phone calls and change the view of the around-view cameras. It operates with a heat sensor in the ceiling, measuring the movement of your hand.
"You can make your life easier with all the innovations that this car has, but now how do you, as a driver, interact best with this?" says Alanna Bahri, product manager for BMW USA. "What's easiest for you? This is just one way that evolves."
Another feature the 7 Series carries is a head-up display (HUD), technology developed – appropriately – from fighter jets. While several car makers use HUDs, this one is 25 per cent larger than that of the last 7 Series and in full colour, displays information on the windshield that the driver would otherwise have to take his eyes off the road to find.
"We're very driver oriented, and we're always looking at ways of making it easier for the driver to interact with the car," says Bahri.
At the Mercedes-Benz booth, the company has just unwrapped its latest E-Class sedan and coupe. Inside, the gauge cluster and centre console screen have been replaced by a single TFT digital screen spanning half the dashboard. But it's just two tiny buttons that are the most significant change: thumb sensors on the steering wheel similar to those on a BlackBerry are used to control the major functions of the car.
"It's now not only convenient, but it's also very safe," says Fabien Stiebert, a specialist for Mercedes in speech interaction, user sensing and gesture recognition, "because your hands stay where they have to be. You can keep your hands on the steering wheel and do everything you would normally do with a touch screen or a controller."
Volvo is also making life easier inside the cabin. Its large, vertical touchscreen that controls the infotainment is one of the more intuitive to use, and can be found not just in the recently unveiled S90 sedan, but also in its Concept 26 autonomous car interior display.
Eric Coelingh, a technical specialist for autonomous driving at Volvo, says the digital displays are better than analogue gauges in that they can be changed to give more information when needed. "If you have a car with dual driving modes, it's very important that the driver understands when he can sit back or when he has to drive manually. So, our gauges change and you can see in a blink of an eye what mode the car is in."
The future of autonomous cars notwithstanding, making drivers less distracted is a priority for many auto makers. The result will be more eyes on the road, more hands on the steering wheel – and fewer lives lost in crashes.
"We look very much at how humans behave while driving," says Coelingh. "We try to understand how can we help them in the best possible way in order to promote safety and make the car and its technologies intuitively useful."
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