Vehicle Feedback and Driver Situation Awareness

A potentially troubling aspect of modern vehicle design – some would argue - is a trend towards isolating the driver and reducing vehicle feedback, usually in the name of comfort and refinement but increasingly because of automation. There can be little doubt cars have become more civilised over the years yet, despite this, the consequences on driver behaviour remain to a large extent anecdotal. Readers of this book will have heard such anecdotes for themselves. They usually take the form of drivers of a certain age recalling their first cars from the 1970’s or 80’s, in which "doing 70mph really felt like it". The question is whether such anecdotes actually reflect a bigger, more significant issue that could be better understood? Related questions have been explored in other domains such as aviation, where the change to ‘fly-by-wire’, for example, did indeed bring about some occasionally serious performance issues which were not anticipated. Despite some clear parallels automotive systems have been left relatively unexamined. The research described in this monograph aims to explore precisely these issues from a Human Factors perspective.