Mode Confusion -- Time for Car Manufacturers to Listen to Aircraft Experience

EE|Times has a great article/interview about mode confusion, with semi-autonomous driving (safety?) features. These are showing up in more and more new cars, for one example, automatic lane keeping. Sometimes the system is working, other times not and, according to the article the distinction is frequently not at all obvious to the driver.

'Mode Confusion' Vexes Drivers, Carmakers:

NHTSA vs. NTSB
Curiously, regulators are more worried about the safety issues of fully autonomous vehicles than the more immediate concerns of safety for vehicles operating in partial autonomy.

The advanced notice of proposed rule making (ANPRM) recently issued by NHTSA seeks input from the public, as the agency plans to develop a framework for safety in Automated Driving Systems (ADS) - fully autonomous vehicles.

Last week, NTSB, responding to ANPRM, made it abundantly clear that NTHSA should be first "incorporating into the safety framework the lessons learned from NTSB crash investigations." By "lessons learned," NTSB means their investigations of crashes that involved vehicles operating in partial automated mode.

Describing driver/operator attention as "an integral component of lower level automation systems," NTSB stressed that "a driver monitoring system must be able to assess whether and to what degree the driver is performing the role of automation supervisor."

Further down, there is an interview with an ex-F-18 pilot who tells of a fellow pilot who experienced mode confusion first hand:

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