Outside, on a test track, and inside, in a pair of test labs at General Motors Co.’s sprawling proving grounds in Milford, Michigan, researchers are paying attention to the ways drivers aren’t paying enough attention to the road when they’re behind the wheel—distracted driving behaviors that can trigger crashes often leading to serious injuries or death.
“We do technology assessments and innovation, really, to look at what can we do from a vehicle perspective to combat some of these things that we see out on the road— the risky driving behaviors,” said Tricia Morrow, manager, GM safety crash avoidance technology and strategy team in an interview during an exclusive tour of the automaker’s driver distraction test labs.
“With the labs helping, we can determine whether these features are meeting our guidelines,” added Dan Glaser, driver distraction performance owner, who oversees the test labs.
Human cost of distract driving
In 2022, 3,309 people were killed by distracted driving according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA.
Distracted driving is defined by NHTSA as any activity that diverts attention from driving that includes talking or texting on your phone, eating and drinking, talking to people in your vehicle, “fiddling with the stereo, entertainment or navigation system.”
The agency cites reading or writing texts as a particularly dangerous activity. Doing so for five seconds at 55 miles per hour is like driving with one’s eyes closed for the length of a football field, 100 yards, according to NHTSA.
Drivers are most distracted in the middle of the day, peaking at 1 p.m. according to a study released Tuesday by AI dashboard camera company Samsara. Arizona is the state with the highest number of distractions per 1,000 miles driven, according to the study. Among the states with the lowest number were Alaska, Idaho, Minnesota, West Virginia, Maine, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, Kentucky, and Wisconsin, according to the study.
Samsara’s AI dash cams contain drowsiness detection and alert technology.
Simulating distracted driving
GM operates two test labs at its Milford Proving Grounds—the Drive-On Simulator and the Mini-Sim simulator.
The Drive-On simulator uses actual vehicles built by GM or a competitor to better understand what tasks lead to excessive distraction. A test driver is taught a certain task, such as searching for a location on the navigation system as illustrated in the video below.
“If a task is designed in a way where there’s too much text, or it’s too long, or it’s too busy, or there are certain interactions that we shouldn’t be doing when driving, we’ll see that based on the behavioral data, the eye glance data, so we’ll see the eyes looking away from the road too much, too long,” explained Mike Wuergler, research lead and manager, usability and driver workload team. “We go back to the design teams and we say, hey, can’t do that, that’s just way too busy. So when that happens, we have ways that we mitigate those types of behaviors in that we limit tasks.”
Those methods include visual and audio warnings along with disabling manual keyboard operation in favor of voice activated commands that do not require the driver to look away from the road.
The Mini-Sim is for testing the effect of distracted driving behaviors and mitigation methods in prototype vehicles to help advise designers and engineers of potential ergonomic issues early in product development, according to Wuergler.
Out on the test track, a demonstration of one of GM’s latest technologies for reducing driver distraction. It’s called Driver Attention Assist, which uses a camera aimed at the driver as well as steering wheel-mounted infrared LEDs to detect if the driver is becoming dangerously drowsy.
“We’re looking for visual cues of drowsiness, like blink rate, eye opening, your head position, all these cues,” explained systems engineer Nicholas Caruana, as he drove the Cadillac Escalade demonstration vehicle down the track.
The system uses the nine-point Karolinska Sleepiness Scale to determine the level of drowsiness a driver is showing. The KSS was developed by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. It ranges from level one, extremely alert, to level nine, extremely sleepy, fighting sleep.
When the system detects Caruana is demonstrating drowsy behavior a coffee cup icon will light up along with a chime. As his level of drowsiness escalates the system will not only sound an alert, it will pop up a menu of suggested activities including navigating to an area of interest, calling up a music playlist or calling a friend.
“We’re trying to just mitigate the driver, so that way we can get them alert enough to be safe on the road and to get somewhere,” said Caruana.
The customer has the option of turning off Driver Attention Assist or adjusting its sensitivity level depending on the number of alerts desired, said Divya Pemmaraju, senior product manager.
“Right now, we’re limiting the first introduction to alerts only to get the customers engaged with the feature and get their data to say, how do they like it,” explained Pemmaraju. “In the future, based on the customer needs, we’re going to hopefully expand.”
Balancing alerts with driver satisfaction
“We’re going to have more data to work with to really understand the effectiveness,” added Glaser. “If you’re getting sleepy and you’re eventually kind of closing your eyes and about to fall asleep, now we have a feature meant to kind of catch that and beep and wake you up. So I think that’s just huge.”
GM supports several initiatives, including the Governor’s Highway Safety Administration which works with various states’ pilot programs for reducing distracted driving, according to Morrow.
The automaker also works with programs aimed at teen drivers to encourage them to spend less time on their smartphones and get involved in other projects such as dosomething.org, or put them down completely while driving, Morrow said.
Indeed, teen drivers are especially susceptible to getting into crashes resulting from distracted driving.
“At least in one study, they were three times more at risk of a crash or near- crash than experienced drivers went when doing a secondary task,” Glaser pointed out.
As automakers install more safety technology that includes alerts and automatic actions, such as emergency braking and lane centering, they’re faced with a double dilemma—still one more mission at GM’s driver distraction labs.
“It’s a fine balance between alerting you to really help save lives or to keep everyone on the roadway safe and not alerting you so much that you want to turn the feature off,” said Morrow. “So as the features evolve, you’ll see it become more and more customer accepted. So that’s also what we do over here in this lab, and what we do in safety is that constant refinement.”
