The Data Mining Car of the Future

22 May 2008, 8:54am

Your car may soon be able tell you about oncoming vehicles in your lane around a blind curve or try to calm you down when commuting raises your blood pressure. Great! But on the down side, it may also tell your insurance company how many times you have driven over the posted speed limit or might alert ‘drive in’ style vendors when you drive by their premises.

Thanks to a $5.75 million donation by Volkswagen, the new Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab (VAIL) is being created at Stanford University, which will also house a teaching and research program called CarLab.

CarLab researchers, led by Professor Clifford Nass, are figuring how to make vehicles collect information on where you drive - and how fast, your preferences and how you react to road incidents. Microsoft also wants to bring Google-style advertising to your dashboard, where Nass comments “... the driver is a great captive audience." However, letting insurance companies in on your most frequent driving habits – or a tendency to park in high-risk areas, for example, could lead to new liability premiums being imposed. However, the location-aware car could also recommend where to get a good meal and for safe(r) drivers, the insurance company would know that as well, and so might reduce your premium.

The “thinking car” could make you a safer and happier driver. A large part of Nass’s research focuses on how a car’s voice can influence your emotional state. The “car of the future” could study your voice, facial expressions and emotional state using a camera and perhaps even blood pressure monitors placed in the steering wheel, and then change its tone to match your perceived mood. A study using a subdued voice reduced the accident rate of angry drivers by up to 15% simply by changing the tone of voice of the car.

The new “data-mining” car of the future could also save you money by monitoring your driving habits, for example by telling you how much petrol you are wasting by driving or accelerating too fast. With fuel prices being what they are today, this becomes increasingly important. General Motors are developing semi-autonomous cars, removing drivers from the front seat entirely. The big question remaining in such initiatives is how do you turn over control to the car and how does the car return control to you? What if the reason you stepped on the accelerator while leaving a stop light was to avoid a dangerous driver entering the intersection who did not stop? In this case, you don’t want human-car negotiation to take too long!

Geo: International