Being a bit of a petrolhead, I've been keeping up to date with all the developments in 'driver assistance' aids and self driving cars as you would expect but the weather yesterday got me thinking.
The current state of the art for mass market cars have things like ABS brakes, cruise control, traction control, auto wipers and auto lights all fitted but yesterday was foggy. My own car has all of the above but it does not have enough intelligence to identify fog and react accordingly so I manually turned on my fog lights. Driving along on my way to work, I was taken by how many cars had nothing more than running lights illuminated.
Clearly, I can't vouch for all the vehicles that I drove past but. I'd wager a fair number of them had auto light systems like mine and the owners hadn't thought to check their dashboard to see if their headlights or fog lights had come on.
My worry is that could this be a symptom where drivers are no longer questioning automated systems and as such what will the next systems be that might need our attention. I'd hate to think of the progress towards running vehicles packed closely together for efficiency being littered with hard won lessons.
I for one will keep the automated systems in my vehicles monitored closely,
