Confused About Automated Driving Features? You’re Not Alone.

0:05In May of last year, a Ford engineer was driving with her husband near Toledo, Ohio. They were on the freeway in a Ford F-150. And according to them, they were using a hands-free driving feature.

0:20And the way that they describe it, there just was this sort of frantic moment where they said that they had this Blue Cruise vehicle. feature on a Ford from Ford System engaged at the time, and they couldn't figure out how to turn it off. That's our colleague Ryan Felton. According to court records he reviewed, the driver said he tapped the brakes, but instead of stopping, the truck accelerated. The truck ended up crashing into a guardrail. Police body camera footage showed it had flipped completely upside down. Are they responding? Yeah, they're both good. They're just trapped. It was just a very, you know, scary crash just visually to see and just imagine that someone's truck just, as they put it, acted erratically and then kind of flipped over.

1:09Emergency responders extricated the couple from the car. They were put in the hospital, and the Ford engineer's husband needed surgery and wore a neck brace after. That's according to court records and police filings. The driver thought the crash was caused by a malfunction with the car's automated driving tech, Blue Cruise. Based on their statements, there was an absolute disconnect between what they thought the truck was doing versus what it was actually doing. And in the end, they experienced this, you know, pretty treacherous crash. Ford told federal regulators that Blue Cruise wasn't engaged, and the driver actually pressed the gas pedal.

1:52But our colleague Ryan says that the story of the driver in Toledo points to a bigger issue. That this technology, which is supposed to make driving safer, is in some cases making drivers confused. And that confusion has contributed to accidents.

2:12Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Wednesday, July 29th.

2:24Coming up on the show, cars are becoming more hands-free. Some drivers are struggling to adjust.

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3:47These days, there's a wide spectrum of what automated driving technology means. On one end, you have fully autonomous taxis like Waymo that have no driver at all. And on the other, there are driver assistance technologies that control some aspects of driving, like braking, highway steering, and adaptive cruise control. Tesla's have full self-driving while supervised GM has something called Super Cruise And Ford has Blue Cruise It works on certain highways Blue Cruise is kind of like an add-on feature It handles steering, speed Plus the third option is being able to go hands-free This kind of technology Which many safety advocates believe makes driving safer Really started taking shape in the auto industry about a decade ago The hope was that self-driving cars would eventually be mass-produced and ultimately reduce accidents and save lives.

4:43The first company to mainstream some of this technology was Tesla, with a system called Autopilot. So we've been able to accelerate Autopilot and bring it to market faster than originally anticipated. It wasn't fully autonomous driving, but Autopilot could control a Tesla's speed and even turn the steering wheel. But drivers were still supposed to be ready to take over at any moment. So we integrate those four systems and the car can do almost anything. Tesla's technology really kind of started this wave of every automaker now coming up with their own sort of branded technology. While Tesla's tech was first getting on the road, it seemed like a completely self-driving future was just on the horizon.

5:28At Ford, executives there were having an internal debate on this technology. Should it lean into fully autonomous cars? Or should it do something more incremental? There was kind of two camps where you had some folks who thought you could pursue technology like Tesla's autopilot, which is kind of this lower form of automation where the car would control steering and speed. Ford, though, its executives at the time were pretty outspoken about the idea that this sort of technology just doesn't work for the driver and had the point of view that they just needed to go straight to full automation. Some Ford executives worried that just going partly towards automation would make things more confusing because it's not always clear when the driver's in charge or when the car is.

6:19Purely just from a safety standpoint that it's too difficult, the executives were saying at the time, to keep drivers in the loop. Like the idea of this technology is it's a supplement to driving, but you have to remain vigilant and keep your eyes on the road at all times and be ready to take control of the car if prompted. So why did Ford ultimately decide to go the incremental route and add driver assistance technologies instead of waiting until fully autonomous driving was ready? I think like everyone else, Ford came around to the idea that autonomy was going to take much longer than anyone realized.

6:57If you go back and look at the statements in 2016, 2017, we all should have been driving around in self-driving cars by now. Once it became clear that autonomy in a significant and robust scope was going to take much longer, that's when you saw the shift and beginning of the development of the system that ultimately became Blue Cruise. Earlier this year, Ryan started looking into how and why Ford made that decision. He reviewed confidential company documents from 2018 and 2019. I think the thing I was just trying to get at, try to better understand, was just what did drivers think when this stuff was in development?

7:36And what the studies that Ford had done showed was that there was definitely this sort of confusion that we're talking about. Documents for multiple Ford studies showed that some drivers didn't understand how to use certain features. stopped paying attention to the road or failed to respond to warnings to retake control. And one of the biggest examples that came up was if your car veers out of a lane, are you supposed to steer it back into the lane or will the car do it? That's something that in some of the studies, a number of people didn't get right and didn't understand. And also what's so confusing about this is that every carmaker is different because the first time that I drove a car with this technology was in 2020 and it had automated braking and it was amazing in stop and go traffic.

8:19But then a year later, I was in a different car made by a different automaker and I was using what I thought was the same automated braking system. But this one turned off under 20 miles an hour. And thank God I was quick enough to slam on my brakes, you know, but I couldn't believe that these cars were so different. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of like their point about how transposing the technology is like. A decade ago when everyone was kind of thinking autonomous cars were around the corner, like the thinking was like these sorts of steps and tech measures that you're seeing in cars now was like probably not a good idea because of all this sort of things that we're talking about.

8:55And that's why you have companies that were like, no, we're just going to do autonomy. And I mean, I think that's still like, I think what the reporting kind of showed is like that's still a relevant point.

9:09Ford told the journal that it took steps to improve Blue Cruise before rolling it out, such as by refining the graphics on vehicle dashboard. and the messaging used to alert drivers to, quote, further improve the driver's understanding of their responsibility. Ford launched its version of automated driving assistance technology in 2018, a feature called Copilot 360. In 2021, it launched Blue Cruise, which included hands-free driving. Just this week, Ford said drivers have logged more than 800 million miles with it on. Today, Blue Cruise is designed for use on the highway. it could control a car's speed and let you take your hands off the steering wheel.

9:50There's a camera that tracks your eyes to make sure you're paying attention to the road. And the company says it makes it clear on its website, in owner's manuals, and external communications, that drivers are required to remain attentive and be ready to take the wheel at any moment. If the system believes that you're not paying attention, what does it do to bring you back? I think it's pretty consistent across pretty much any automaker. You may get a steering wheel buzz, like a nag in that sense. If the car starts to veer out of the lane a little, it may buzz an alert in the dashboard to let you know that you need to pay attention.

10:28It may sound a beep or an alarm of some sounds. I mean, every automaker kind of deploys a different set of techniques. It's like just basically haptics and sounds to alert you that something's going on that requires your attention, more or less. But in some cases, these beeps and buzzes haven't been enough to avoid accidents. That's next.

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12:02After that Ford engineer and her husband crashed an F-150 in Toledo last year, the driver, the engineer's husband, blamed Blue Cruise. When police got there, according to the initial reports just from police and then what was initially conveyed to Ford, they blamed it on an error with the cruise control. And when they talked to Ford about the incident afterward, the employee who was the passenger at the time, she had conveyed that they had had Blue Cruise on at the time and they weren't able to disable it as they were making a merge on the highway. And in that moment, when they were trying to figure out what was going on with it, that's when the truck burst through a guardrail.

12:45But cars with this technology are continuously collecting a lot of data. And Ford can see when Blue Cruise is engaged. When Ford looked at the data, they noted that the driver had disengaged the system beforehand and had pressed down on the accelerator, fully compressed it. Ford said that in the moments before the crash, the driver had pressed down on the gas pedal, not the brake. It sort of reminds me of those sudden acceleration cases from years ago, where people thought cars were suddenly accelerating, but it turned out they were just trying to slam on the brakes, but accidentally hitting the wrong pedal.

13:23It's a common phenomenon, for sure. If you're in a moment of panic and you think you're braking, but instead you hit the wrong pedal, it's just if you are listening to what the driver and his wife said, you know, it was just a clear example, you know, I think, of people who had a misunderstanding of what this tech was actually doing, according to the data that came out later. The driver did not respond to requests for comment. His wife, the Ford engineer, declined to comment through Ford. Police issued the driver a traffic ticket for failure to control the car. He goes to court after telling the officers that it was a cruise control malfunction, contesting that he wanted time to contest the ticket.

14:06because he said the issue with the truck was a cruise control malfunction. But it was just one of those things where he, you know, to me, it underscored just how much that they actually had the point of view that it must have been this technology because he was literally contesting the idea that he failed to control the car. Like, he was blaming the tech straight up. I mean, either way, like, he was confused about what was happening with the vehicle, and that contributed to the crash. Even if Blue Cruise was not malfunctioning, but he thought it was operational and he wasn't, you know, a confused driver is clearly not necessarily a safe one.

14:44Yeah, and I think that just gets back to, I think, the larger point, which is, you know, Tesla's technology came out 2015, GM's a couple years later, Ford's has been out several years now. You have many years of this stuff being on the road. So, you know, I think that there's definitely still a question of just how well people understand what they're using. And this just, I think, really illustrated it. There have been other prominent crashes, too. In 2024, there were two crashes involving Ford cars that did have Blue Cruise engaged. One of them happened in San Antonio. The driver was traveling at highway speeds, had Blue Cruise on, and it was late at night.

15:25And there was a parked stationary car in the middle of the road at the time of the incident. Didn't stop in time. That driver, in a Mustang Mach-E, crashed into the parked car on the road. The driver in the parked car died. In a report to federal regulators, Ford said that the Blue Cruise system had tried to alert the driver to retake the wheel, but the warnings were ignored for 30 seconds prior to the collision. When regulators dug into these crashes and started looking at other crashes, they found out that Ford had designed its speed control technology to stop acknowledging stationary objects when traveling at effectively highway speeds.

16:07Ford said it made that adjustment because of a phenomenon called phantom braking. That's when the car would stop at high speed on the highway because it detected a stationary object on the road that actually wasn't there. The way the tech works, essentially, once you start getting up to highway speeds, you could, it may start, like if you go under a highway overpass, for example, that could trigger the advanced cruise control to slam on the brakes and slow down, even if no other car is in front of you. So there's that element of it that is, you know, I think kind of underscores again, like a limitation that just maybe drivers aren't aware of.

16:45Ford said there may not be adequate time for either a human driver or the automated driving system to respond under certain conditions, such as approaching an unlit vehicle at nighttime at highway speeds.

16:59To be sure, there are a lot of car crashes in the U.S. each year, and many don't have anything to do with automated driving technology. And many safety advocates do believe the technology makes driving safer overall. Since 2021, Ford has reported to U.S. regulators 32 crashes, including three that were fatal, in which the company's automated driving technology was suspected to be engaged at the time of the collision, according to federal data. According to Ford, only a handful of those incidents directly involved the Blue Cruise. How have regulators been responding to the growing use of this technology?

17:35Yeah, the short answer is that they've been aggressively paying attention to how this technology is being used and incidents that have come up. There's just a countless number of investigations that are open right now into potential defects in these cars and this technology. I think with respect to the type of stuff that's in Ford's vehicles, I mean, they've been pretty insistent on the point that at the end of the day, drivers still need to remain in the loop and they can't cede that point of view at all. So they very much have taken the point of view that drivers are responsible when using the technology, but they're still taking pains to investigate whether the technology is just fundamentally safe or not.

18:20It feels like our relationship with vehicles is changing. Like we grew up and many Americans, you know, had, we've had cars our whole lives, but like the way you operated a vehicle fundamentally didn't really change. The steering wheel, the brake pedals, you know, but now there are these new features that change our relationship with the car and those can be difficult to get used to. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where it's like you learn to ride a bike and then riding a bike secondhand nature. But when there's no real set standards for how this technology is used, like even the buttons on a steering wheel could differ from car to car.

18:58Like you're not going to necessarily get into a car and understand what it's going to do from the jump. I mean, if you read a driver's manual now about this technology, you know, it'll go on for many pages and say the lane centering can handle this degree level of turn. And it's like, well, I'm not in real time going to know like what a 37 degree or whatever it is. I'm just making up a number. But like, that's just not possible. So at the end of the day, you have to be alert at all times when using it. But it's like, is that really making you for some people? Yeah, it makes them feel more comfortable when they drive.

19:34But like for others, it just totally freaks them out. I mean, it makes me wonder, like, do we need to update our driver's licenses? Like, should people need to take a test before they can use this technology? I mean, I think as someone who's covered this a long time, what the story was really kind of getting at for me is there's still a lot of uncertainty with some people about what this stuff actually is doing and what its limitations are.

20:14That's all for today. Wednesday, July 29th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts throughout every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Thank you.