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Can your car be sued for letting you fall a-sleep?

A car that tells you to wake up, watch the road

March 12, 2007

After a tough week at the office, the highway stretches ahead of you. The car is warm and the engine hums. Your eyelids slowly close.

And then, there's a sudden puff of air on the back of your neck. The steering wheel vibrates in your hands and a buzzer sounds. Your car is waking you.

The car has been watching your face and, through the steering wheel, feeling your pulse. It knew you were about to fall asleep.

Indeed, falling asleep at the wheel is not uncommon. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a 2002 report that an estimated 1,500 people a year were killed and 71,000 injured in more than 100,000 crashes caused by fatigue. The study covered the 1989-92 period, the latest for which numbers were available.

Think of it this way: Drivers often close their eyes for up to three seconds at a time as drowsiness approaches. At 70 miles an hour, that's like driving the length of a football field with your eyes closed.

“This whole issue is sort of a symptom; people are busier than they ever have been, they spend more time on the roads, they're struggling to keep up, they spend more time behind the wheel and they're exhausted,” said Jonathan Adkins, spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association, based in Washington.

Ksenia Kozak, a Ford biomechanics engineer with expertise in the way people connect to technology, said we all might nod off to some extent when we're driving long distances. The cause is something most of us do: shifting our internal clocks by working extended schedules that violate the day-night cycle, shorting ourselves on sleep and undertaking critical tasks like driving at a time when the body just wants to snooze.

At Ford, Kozak led a study last year of sleep-stressed drivers in a simulated Volvo in the Virttex (Virtual Test Track Experiment) simulator. The drivers, deprived of sleep for 23 hours, drove for three hours.

Kozak's team found it possible to cut incidences of lane wandering in half by giving drivers an alert when the car was about to stray. She said the best warning was one that vibrated the steering wheel while also turning it slightly in the correct direction.

Interviewing the drivers, Kozak said she found that most of them were honest about how drowsy they felt at various times, but not very accurate about how they were performing. Sleepy drivers characteristically overestimated their alertness and abilities, she said.

Automakers and traffic safety experts have long sought a cure for the drowsy driver, using both low-and high-tech systems.

The problem has been that low-end technology, like a wearable device connected by wires that would sound a buzzer when a driver's head flopped forward, was cumbersome and ineffective, while high-tech systems like one that used infrared beams to measure head-nodding were too complex and pricey.

The solution has been physical, installing rumble strips and marking lanes and center lines using raised “Botts Dots” to give a thumping-tire warning, a potential last-chance reminder.

These passive measures have reduced crashes caused by cars wandering off the road by 20 percent to 50 percent, according to the Federal Highway Administration, but technology companies are looking to actively warn drivers even earlier.

Today, with tiny computer-chip-based video cameras and in-car software, automotive suppliers may finally have the technology riddle solved to create systems that could be produced in the next decade.

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