Book Review: Human Factors in Automotive Engineering and Technology

This book is a good primer for readers who are new to the field of automotive human factors. The 310-page work can be divided into three topics: human factors issues on automotives, driver–vehicle interactions, and vehicle automation. Strongly backed by empirical evidence and a comprehensive literature review, Walker, Stanton, and Salmon provide an overview of technology for automotive engineering, point out challenges drivers are facing, define how technology can assist drivers, and indicate how drivers should collaborate with and trust the technology.

In the prologue, the authors advocate that human factors design principles should be used earlier and more comprehensively in the vehicle design process to improve safety, efficiency, and enjoyment. Such early implementation could lead to large positive outcomes. A significant contribution by the authors is the “Hierarchical Task Analysis of Driving,” which breaks the driving task down into more than 1,600 bottom-level tasks. The details are provided in the appendix.

This treatise is very helpful for the analysis of driver error and its cause and for developing a training plan. Methodologies such as the Systematic Human Error Reduction and Prediction Approach and Rasmussen’s Skill, Rule, Knowledge framework are introduced to systematically identify error types.

In several chapters about the interactions between the driver and the vehicle, the emphasis is on how driver workload, situation awareness, stress, trust, and performance will be affected as drivers receive various feedbacks from the vehicle. The authors’ previous work with some other colleagues enlivens their statements and provides experimental evidence to enhance their contentions. The results lead to the discussion of vehicle automation, for which adaptive cruise control (ACC) is used as an example to describe human factors insights for safety and trust in automation.

As an automotive human factors researcher, I found these insights helpful for setting up protocols for testing the interaction between the driver and vehicle automation technologies. I also learned how to design and evaluate these technologies from a systematic viewpoint.

Despite the great value of this work, I have two criticisms. Although in the first chapter, the authors contend that there are applicable lessons to be learned from aviation, descriptions in the book attempting to connect aviation lessons to automotive technology are somewhat weak. Second, using only ACC (Level 1: function-specific automation) to cover so many topics about vehicle automation seems insufficient. The other three, higher levels of automation (Level 2: combined function automation; Levels 3 and 4: limited and full self-driving automation) are largely ignored, and the findings can be different.

This book is a good introduction to fundamental automotive human factors knowledge. It will be a great contribution to automotive technology designers who try to solve problems from the user’s (driver’s) perspective.