Autonomous cars still have quite a few bumps to overcome. The technical, financial, and societal ones have been discussed many times by now. That is not true of a more medical implication of autonomous vehicles: they cause car sickness. In his inaugural address to TU Delft, Prof. Riender Happee elaborated.
Self-driving cars have great potential for providing safe, comfortable, and sustainable transportation…Yet there are still several obstacles to overcome before self-driving cars will really be accepted by the general public, and travel time can really be spent differently.
“All in all, many factors play a role in car sickness,” notes the new professor. “In the next few years, we want to develop further and integrate biomechanical models of the human body, the perception of motion, and the occurrence of car sickness, giving us an even better picture of the processes involved in the development of car sickness. With these models and the underlying understanding, we will be able to design self-driving vehicles much more effectively, considering conditions, tasks, and individual differences.”
