IIHS Says Ford BlueCruise Beats Rivals In One Key Area

Partially autonomous systems such as Ford’s BlueCruise hands-free highway driving assist feature have garnered their fair share of criticism as of late, with a handful of fatal crashes occurring with those features engaged. On top of various investigations into those tragedies, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) previously rated BlueCruise “poor” in its own testing of that and rival systems, though it also claims that partially autonomous features aren’t currently regulated adequately, and also recently released a study that found these types of features don’t actually help prevent crashes from occurring. Now, however, the IIHS has given us a bit of good news in regard to BlueCruise.

Recently, Alexandra Mueller, a senior IIHS research scientist, conducted a study revolving around partial autonomous driving features, and discovered that drivers who are used to features that switch off when they try to share control over the steering are less willing to steer or put their hands on the wheel in more dangerous situations, while the drivers of vehicles with systems that allow some manual steering are more inclined to take an active role. To come up with this data, Mueller conducted an online survey of 1,260 owners of Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Infiniti, and Tesla vehicles equipped with partial automation who regularly use the technology.

Out of those systems, Ford’s BlueCruise and Nissan/Infiniti’s ProPILOT Assist system are the only two that remain switched on when the driver makes steering adjustments within the lane, while BlueCruise allows for hands-free driving under certain conditions. IIHS showed participants a video in which a driver executed a simple maneuver to move their vehicle from one side of a lane to another, and then asked them how their system responds when they make a similar adjustment – confirming that Ford and Nissan’s systems continue to provide support, but also allow the driver to dictate the vehicle’s position in the lane. This maneuver caused Tesla and GM systems to stop lane-centering support, after which they had to be reactivated manually and/or automatically, respectively, highlighting some stark differences between these systems.

“Those are sizable differences,” Mueller said. “Although there could be many reasons, one plausible explanation is that systems that switch themselves off whenever the driver steers may make drivers less likely to want to intervene, as it’s a pain to reactivate the system again and again. These findings suggest that cooperative steering may have an implicit influence on how willing drivers are to take action when the situation calls for it, regardless of how they think their system is designed.”