Why autonomous cars should drive the way we do

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Imagine for a moment the comfort of having your car driven for you by a finely tuned, meticulously programmed computer, while you relax in the passenger seat, reading a novel, doing the crossword puzzle or taking in the scenery without a care.

Now imagine that instead of a computer, it's a New York cabbie driving. Or your grandfather. Or your teenage daughter. Or my teenage daughter.

The car is still being driven for you, but suddenly, that passenger seat isn't so comfortable.

As drivers, we're never as comfortable as when we or someone with the same risk tolerance and driving style is at the wheel. In that sense, even a well-trained computer might frighten us by taking a curve faster than we'd like, or exasperate us by hewing too blindly to the speed limit.

This is something the pioneers of the autonomous vehicle think hard about. Their work is motivated by the pressing need to make our roads and the interactions between vehicles safer overall. But they also know that for their vision of safe, self-driving cars to take hold, each "operator" must feel comfortable with the decisions those cars make on when to brake, how fast to accelerate, when to pass or how fast to take a turn.

At the map-making company Here, a Nokia subsidiary and major auto supplier that's just been sold to an auto industry consortium, they call this challenge "humanized driving" -- making automated driving comfortable and acceptable for humans, in order to avoid unsettling surprises.

"One of the reasons to build this humanized driving is to make these vehicles not behave very differently from other vehicles on the road," said Ogi Redzic, head of connected driving for Here, in an interview on the sidelines of last month's Automated Vehicles Symposium. "One part is to make humans inside comfortable, but just as big a reason to do something like this is to make people in other vehicles comfortable."

So in developing the next generation of maps that will guide automated vehicles, Here isn't just taking high-res pictures of the world. It's also combing through 15 years of traffic and GPS data that it has collected and recorded to study how real drivers behave in certain situations, such as braking on an exit ramp, or taking a sharp curve. The results of that massive analytics project will be translated into the algorithms that automakers and suppliers use to program the behavior of vehicles.

"At some level, you'd call it a map," said Redzic. "A map not of roads, but of human behavior."

What Here's researchers have found is that just as some cars have a choice of driving modes, drivers fall into three main categories: "comfort," "standard" and "sport." At an exit ramp, for example, the sport drivers take their time adjusting to the lower speed limit, while comfort drivers tend to decelerate early. There are, of course, variations within each category, says Redzic, but "the patterns are distinct." 

For automated driving to be embraced, he says, those patterns and preferences will have to be reflected, within certain safety limits. The self-driving car would have to offer modes to ensure that passengers are not only safe but also comfortable, and these modes might have to be further fine-tuned for when there's a baby in the car, or hot coffee in the cupholder. 

For now, most of Here's readings come from speed data, based on GPS tracking. But Redzic says the analytics shaping the algorithms will become more sophisticated as automakers begin supplying more data from the various sensors built into cars that provide data on weather conditions, brake force and other variables. 

Getting the comfort level just right is critical -- and worth waiting for -- Redzic says, because for automated vehicles, safety won't be enough of a selling proposition on its own. 

As a society, "we all get the benefit" of fewer deaths, says Redzic, "but I don't think humans would willingly invest nearly as much money into this and willingly invest in the future when they buy a car, if there weren't some secondary benefits."

The most obvious benefit is "giving back the commute time to people," he says. "If you don't hold the wheel, you can do many other things with your time." 

Like catch up on a novel, do the puzzle or take in the scenery -- without a care.