Page 259 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

evolved much faster than drivers’ ability to understand and use
the technology. For instance, many people who were driving ve-
hicles with push-button start/stop functionality did not know
how to turn off the engine in an emergency, and many vehicles
now have transmission shift gate designs that make it unclear how
to put the car in neutral. Such issues might lead to the NHTSA’s
setting a standard for push-button ignition systems and for the
layout of transmission shifters so that drivers won’t need to learn
how these systems behave in each different vehicle. There’s no
doubt that a greater focus on human factors by vehicle manu-
facturers will benefit everyone, but there’s still a long way to go.
Consumer Reports’s David Champion notes that research shows
that antilock brakes haven’t provided much safety benefit—
not because the technology doesn’t work, but because most drivers
don’t use them correctly, easing off the pedal when they feel a skid
starting rather than pressing more firmly and letting the antilock
system take over. Edward Niedermeyer also believes that the man-
ufacturers often aren’t thinking about the right issues: “I see more
manufacturers talking about how to integrate Twitter and Face-
book into their cars . . . than manufacturers trying to figure out
how to make sure that drivers know how to drive the vehicles.”
But there are limits to what manufacturers can do. No matter
what safety mechanisms are put into cars, for the time being at
least, human beings will be driving them, and those humans make
mistakes. Richard Schmidt, coauthor of the Silver Book, and his
colleagues have found that pedal configuration has virtually no
effect on pedal misapplication.* The most significant cause of
pedal misapplication is simply that our bodies don’t always do
* Doris Trachtman, Richard Schmidt, and Douglas Young, “The Role of Pedal
Configuration in Unintended-Acceleration and Pedal-Error Accidents,” Proceed-
ings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 49th Annual Meeting, 2005.

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