It's not about misconceptions, humans just aren't capable of it. Maintaining concentration when you're actively taking part in a task is doable, but maintaining concentration when you haven't had to do _anything_ for the past two hours is not. It isn't about whether the driver believes they should be paying attention or not, it's just not how human attention works.
Just because a driver has less things to attend to does not mean he is less attentive. In fact, I would argue a person becomes less attentive to any given thing the more things there are they have to pay attention to.
Burdening a driver with more (arguably unnecessary) cognitive load is not a good idea.
The entire argument falls apart, and quickly. If the statement 'its the drivers responsibility' relies on us completely ignoring human behaviours and patterns.
People are falliable, and encouraging people to not concentrate and put trust into auto-pilot, and knowing with every kilometre travelled. People concentrate less and less. Who is at fault when the car misbehaves and breaks away from expected behaviours?
It's not hard to understand, even though it's completely insane. People simply don't think about driving as a dangerous activity requiring their full attention.
Sadly, competent human drivers are rare. Humans are terrible at paying attention to boring things and accidents are too rare to keep people's attention. Worse it's the edge cases where someone is not paying attention that tends to lead to most accidents.
Humans weren't built to drive. We can't support our attention during an entire trip, we can't deal with several variables at the same time, and we have all those emotional heuristics that are completely counterproductive when driving.
Reading these comments trivialising the driving task makes me wonder if such commenters have ever actually driven or if they are just prone to magical thinking.
I would say it's a testament to the human ability to reduce very complex tasks to very simple descriptions that can be kept out of rational awareness. The impressive thing is that even the wrong beliefs of a given person work for them. Remember, the people effectively arguing that driving is "easy" still understand that humans fail at it regularly. So it's mismatch in their understanding of how smart humans are, something that probably doesn't impact their daily lives.
The problem is that the "paying attention" part of driving is actually one of the most mentally taxing for the driver and it seems the pay attention 100% of the time is basically the same as saying 5% of the time an event might occurs that requires your immediate action. The problem being that if you have to jump into action to avoid something catastrophic 'sometimes' you basically have to be paying full attention all the time in order to collect enough contextual information about the incident. It's the same as watching someone toss a baseball to you and catching it vs your friend yelling "Headts up!" as a baseball is already flying through the air at your head.
If you're not paying attention, you can easily end up dozing off. You're either more or less paying attention--and yes drivers' attentions can drift a bit--or you're going to take some time to reacquire some awareness of what exactly is going on.
What is this? Of course he stays more concentrated than most people when driving a car because one doesn't have to have that kind of concentration when driving a car. Most mistakes while driving a car are not fatal.
I think you are putting a bit too much faith in human cognition: "when you put a person through 30+ hours driving course, they don't suddenly lose the ability to recognize trees or faces". They do. they get tired and their reaction time slows down. they get drunk, they get distracted. Humans do exactly this - unpredictably lose the ability to recognize and react in a timely manner.
People don't have perfect reflexes, physical coordination, and situational awareness. Someone could be checking their blind spot at the exact moment the person in front of them slams on their brakes. Someone could move their foot over from the gas and for no particular reason completely miss the brake pedal, or sneeze at the exact wrong time, or be stung by a hornet they didn't know was in the car, or simply not react fast enough.
Humans are fallible and make unintentional mistakes. It's surprising that humans are as good at driving as we are and that most of us aren't making catastrophic mistakes on a regular basis.
At least you can rely on 99% of humans to try to act according to self-preservation instinct MOST of the time.
Nope. I see tremendous numbers of distracted drivers who don't even realize there's a threat. I also see many utterly incompetent drivers who will not take any evasive action, including braking, because they simply don't understand basic vehicle dynamics or that one needs to react to unexpected circumstances.
Trust is beside the point. The actual point is that they are able to pay attention to the road, even for prolonged amounts of time, and react to perceived danger, despite not being the ones who are actually in control of the car.
The claim I'm disputing is the one that says people are somehow incapable of paying attention to the road for extended periods of time unless they are in control of the vehicle.
I might agree that a reaction might be jerky and panicky, but then again, they would by definition be so regardless, due to the unexpected nature of accidents
sorry, i didn't mean to present it as a honest argument. this guy was pretty much a criminal on the roads. suicidally speeding driver when sober and a drunk driver when drunk.
what i meant to say is that i don't believe a need to overcome distractions makes you a more attentive driver. in my opinion it's better to have less (car operating complexity) to worry about, because then you can - or at least could - focus on the road better(and i have driven manually shifting cars all my life with very few exceptions).
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