There was recently a wacky story in the news about pedestrians and others in Arlington spotting a driverless car roaming the streets. Turns out, it wasn’t truly driverless. There was a person hidden in the driver’s seat and it was not a trick, but part of an experiment being run by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute to see what the reactions of people would be to the vehicle.
But still why the dress up?
You actually still do need to have someone behind the wheel in real-world testing and Ford and VTTI just needed people to believe wholeheartedly they were using one.
The trial also made use of a light bar mounted on the top of the windshield to provide communication about what the car was doing, including yielding, driving autonomously or accelerating from a full stop.
The Transit Connect van used for the trial would indicate its behavior using signals including a slow white pulse for yielding, a rapid blinking for accelerating from a stop, and staying solid if it’s actively in self-driving mode. The bar is positioned roughly where a driver’s eye line would be, to try to catch the attention of those around it who would look in its direction.
Ford’s chosen signals for the project are simple, but they’re intended to be, and they’re designed to not just replicate existing vehicle signalling apparatus, like break lights and turn signals, but to fill in gaps where we currently communicate via subtle gestures, eye contact and other less obvious mechanisms.
Ford and VTTI conducted VR testing to discover that these definitely need to be learned – people need a few different exposures before they clue in. But there’s potential for them to become widely accepted, provided they’re repeated often and consistently.