May

The Car of the Future Will Know You Can’t Drive

Posted by admin Published in Auto Blog, Auto News

Someday soon your car may be able tell you about an oncoming vehicle in your lane on a blind curve or even calm you down on a harried commute. But it may plus tell your insurance company how often you drive by the speed limit or wired Starbucks when you drive by so that you can be offered a reduction
on a latte.

Stanford professor Clifford Nass and his colleagues at the university’s CarLab are figuring how to assemble vehicles gather knowledge on where you drive, how fast you go, your preferences and how you react when some jerk cuts you off. The technology could manufacture you a better driver and even save you date and money - but it plus could let insurers keep tabs on you and help advertisers reach right into your car.

Nass, who’s being funded in part by automakers, is not the only guy working on that. Microsoft wants to bring Google-style advertising to your dashboard.

“From the point of view of advertisers, the driver is a great
captive audience,” Nass says. “You have the ability of knowing where
the person is, so you can have very location-specific advertising.”

But whether advertisers know where you are, your insurance company will too. And that’s where things get problematic.

“The insurance company could say, ‘Look, you’ve been parking in
high-risk areas. I’m going to raise your collision insurance,’ or
‘We’ve detected that you’ve been driving at 80 miles per hour; that
will affect your liability rates.’ So there are huge social issues
about the car,” he says.

Still, Nass stresses there’s more to the technology than being spied
on or pitched products. Your car could recommend a someplace to get a decent pizza, for example, and your insurance company would know you obey the speed limit and don’t speed up for yellow lights and so cut you a break on your premium.

“Insurance rates are a sensitive topic, but you could have a much
more efficient insurance market with better goods,” Nass says.

A thinking car plus could manufacture you a safer, happier driver. A large part of his research focuses on how a car’s voice can influence your emotional state. He believes

that as the car of the future studies the driver’s voice, facial
expressions and emotional state using a camera and even blood pressure monitors in the steering wheel, it could
change its tone to match your mood. In other words, it’ll known when you’re about to blow your top considering someone cut you off, and soothe your nerves with a friendly voice.

“We did a study where we used a
subdued voice and we showed we can reduce the accident rate of angry
drivers by up to 15% simply by changing the tone of the voice in the
car,” Nass said. He’s conducting a study he calls “Car-Tharsis” to explore different strategies for having cars keep society from getting stressed-out.

“Our research indicates that the strategy that works best is
what we called cognitive reframing, which involves not letting the
negative emotion start in the first place” he says. “So rather than try to repair
the emotion, you try to prevent it. Someone cuts you off and the car
says, ‘Five miles ahead, the road will clear,’ something that changes
your view from anger to something more positive.”

A data-mining car could save you money by monitoring
your driving habits. Drive too fast and the car will tell you how much gas you’re wasting. But the thing that’s got him really excited are semi-autonomous cars. General Motors is developing cars that drive themselves, taking drivers out of the equation entirely, but Nass thinks the automaker might be lost the boat.

“The really interesting question is how do you turn by
control to the car and the car turns by control to you? Let’s say you
press the gas pedal too tough after a stop light. The car could ease up
on the gas pedal to save fuel. But what whether you’re the type of person
who gets delight out of punching it after a stop sign? In that case you
should be able to negotiate with the car.”

Are we really ready to ask our car’s permission to hoon?

Original post by Doug Newcomb