Can AI Make You a Better Driver?

Artificial intelligence has been one of the hottest topics to reach our lips in the last decade. Depending on who you ask, it is either the answer to all our problems or the doom of all mankind, which is a bit of a stretch. As we are the most intelligent species on this little planet, it would be too ironic for us to create something that ultimately destroys us, but not before it helps all our students plagiarize undetected and photoshops all the blemishes and/or wrinkles from every man, woman, and child over 40.  

This level of paranoia comes from the fact that most people are unsure of what AI is capable of, where it fits nicely into our world, and where it enhances our lives, but takes nothing away from it. Every technology-based company around the world has adopted this technology and is currently trying to implement it in their design and production process, and why not? It should streamline their processes and reduce manpower (money).

AI’s influence on the auto industry

For the automobile industry, AI is implemented in one of two ways. You will find it greeting you through an AI dashboard assistant who will help you with everything from creating the perfect road trip to whether Bluey’s best friend is Chloe or Mackenzie, depending on how you live your life. Many cars now feature self-driving technology, offering varying levels of autonomy and delivering mixed results depending on the model. Neither of these applications offers much to people who actually enjoy driving their vehicles.  

Introducing AI driver coaches

But this is all about to change. Enter AI driver coaches. This is the newest tool in the AI automotive world, and at the moment, it is only present in racing games, such as iRacing and Assetto Corsa Competizione. But there have already been experiments with this in real-life cars and private track days. AI Driver coaches do not mean they will be steering the wheel and changing gears for the drivers; the premise behind this new technology is that it should make you a safer and more competent driver overall.

The most popular system currently is trophi.ai, due to the large amount of lap data it can gather, which can be turned into useful information for the driver. So when you have picked your vehicle and are at the starting line, getting ready to race, a synthesized voice will appear and throughout the race will feed you instruction as approach difficult and tricky parts of the race courses and upon completing the more complex sections of the track, it will give you feedback and constructive criticism, so that you can learn and improve. Overall, this software works really well.  

Our experience with AI coaching

Trying it firsthand taught us a few things. When driving our simulation car, the software immediately picked up on where my driving deficiency lay. And when I corrected my driving over the following number of laps, I received praise. Nothing like a compliment to get people onside. But there are a few areas that still need work, including prompting you with information ahead of time. This is great as you have processing time, but when there are multiple things happening at once, it becomes tricky to absorb the information. Also, it cannot tell you any visual points on the track, which would help when it comes to learning the area in which you are driving, as you would use visual points automatically when you are driving a real car. 

 So can AI make you a better driver?

Overall, you can see that AI could help drivers, especially learner drivers, become better drivers. If this were implemented during driving lessons for learner drivers, the caliber of drivers overall would increase, which would reduce accidents and fatalities. Maybe AI won’t be the end of the road after all.