Now that fully and partially autonomous vehicles are officially a thing in our society, we're testing them to see the results of all the tech, and funny enough, what's happening on city streets with L2 Autonomous (Partial Automation) vehicles is starting to make sense.
Simply put, we react differently when driving an L2 autonomous vehicle, and while it may "feel" like much, it's enough to raise the number of accidents happening in our cities. New research unveiled by Dr. Francesco N. Biondi of the University of Windsor, Canada, and the Human Systems Lab has shed light on a rather untested subject: our ability to pay attention to actual driving when we're behind the wheel of an L2 Autonomous vehicle.
Overall, a broad range of aspects of driver behavior and function were tested, including "cognitive overload, physiological activation, and visual attention allocation." All this was tracked over the course of 80 minutes during manual (L0) and L2 driving in a 2022 Tesla Model 3 while hauling proverbial butt on a section on Ontario's Highway 401; heart rate variability and steadiness, pupil size and blink rate, and off-road glances were all tracked for this study.
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