Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are encouraging ‘lazy driving’, the Association of Fleet Professionals (AFP) has warned.
The AFP say that drivers are becoming over reliant on the technology, which is now compulsory on new cars, and are even blaming ADAS for errors that cause accidents. The AFP feels that drivers should receive more training in how to use systems like automatic emergency braking, lane keeping assist and adaptive cruise control.
Lorna McAtear, AFP vice chair and head of fleet at National Grid, said: “We are potentially deskilling drivers by encouraging them to rely on ADAS, but this is a misunderstanding of how the technology is intended to work.
“It is designed to act as a limited driving aid or an emergency safety net, not to take responsibility for aspects of driving. Increasingly, we are seeing situations where the driver blames the car for errors that caused accidents – arguing either the technology should have stopped the incident or indeed, that ADAS actively caused it.
“Sometimes, of course, this is just shifting the blame but in other cases, the driver appears to have completely misunderstood how the devices operate.”
McAtear explained that a key issue for company drivers is that ADAS works differently from car to car.
“Adaptive cruise control, for example, is implemented in distinct ways by each manufacturer, while the degree of pressure on the steering wheel applied by lane departure ranges from gentle to genuinely aggressive,” she said. “Drivers understandably find this confusing.”
McAtear says that for drivers who have been taught to drive defensively with a high degree of anticipation, ADAS can cause problems because they usually intervene at a late stage, so making someone drive in an inconsistent way.
“ADAS has been introduced with limited guidance about how those who created it thought it should be used in everyday driving,” said McAtear.
