Are drivers ready for the high-tech onslaught?

Aug 27, 2008 by Candace Lombardi

Self-parking, auto-braking, always-connected cars will soon be the norm as James Bond-like high-tech gear trickles down from luxury models to budget rides in 2008.

On tap from BMW, Mercedes, GM, Lexus and others are a wide range of high-tech navigation systems, parking assistance features, touch-screen displays, Bluetooth communications and other developments, as human control of mundane–and not-so mundane–systems is being rapidly ceded to automation.

But without one’s own personal Q to explain how each gadget works, how much new tech is too much for the average consumer to handle?

“A lot of it is beneficial…But it can be confusing and in the automobile, that’s a safety threat,” said Don Norman, professor at Northwestern University, author of The Design of Future Things and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a company that consults with major manufacturers on the design of everything from Web sites to car computers.

Norman and others say automakers have their work cut out for them in teaching drivers how to best use these new tools. And then there’s the user interface: Forget about familiar personal computer-like displays. Many advanced systems being placed in cars require no-peek coordination.

The more difficult task might be convincing people that a computer can read a map, place phone calls, apply brakes, mind the blind spot, stay in the right lane and maintain a safe driving distance from the next car better than the average driver.

“Lots of people, including myself, used to say people shouldn’t adapt to tech, tech should adapt to people. But now I look at it and say, ‘We are making tech to be used by everyone across the world. The stove is the same in all cultures despite the fact that the cooking is different,” said Norman.

Regardless of consumer trepidation, the computerized car has arrived not only for behind-the-scenes mechanics, but for driver interaction as well. As one CNET News.com reader put it: “This’ll certainly give new meanings to ‘blue screen of death’ and your computer ‘crashing.”

Perhaps the best indication that the car-as-computer has “arrived” is GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner being added as a keynote speaker for January’s 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show alongside technology leaders like Bill Gates, Intel’s Paul Otelleni and Panasonic’s Toshihiro Sakamoto.

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