Bryan Reimer Presents on the Gradual Progress of AVs at Best of Belron 2024
by Adam Felts
AgeLab Research Scientist and the AVT Consortium’s Founder and Co-Director Bryan Reimer gave a keynote presentation at the Best of Belron 2024 Conference, a meeting to discuss trends in the automotive industry including advancements in autonomous driving and artificial intelligence.
Dr. Reimer’s presentation, titled Assisted and Automated Driving: A Savior in the Making?” contextualized driver assistance technology as having a history going back decades – one that has lessons as we reckon with the future of technologies in vehicles.
Automated vehicles, or AVs, are the pinnacle of AI-enabled technology in automobiles. Currently, AVs are operating in select places around the world. However, efforts to place AVs on public roads have led to failures. They have interacted poorly with other road users, triggering questions about their safety. Rather than a quantum leap toward AVs, we are more likely to leverage elements of AI-enabled technology to support gradual improvements in the vehicles that people drive today.
With this trajectory in mind, the AgeLab’s AVT Consortium is centered on observing how drivers of vehicles outfitted with assistance technologies behave behind the wheel . While assistance technologies can make driving easier, they also make it easier to do other non-driving related activities – a phenomenon that can be observed going back to the introduction of the automatic transmission and power steering – and so contribute to driver distraction and increased risk.
Dr. Reimer argues that automakers and regulators need to work more closely to articulate and understand the risks and benefits of automation in vehicles –– and design a path forward that more closely aligns with the capabilities and interests of operators and follows the “Safe System” approach.
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