GM Cars Of The Future To Monitor Motorists?

The car of the future may be able to keep tabs on its driver. General Motors will be launching a new in-car technology that can tell whether or not drivers are distracted by the placement of their eyes and head. Reports indicate that GM will be putting these driver-monitoring devices into as many as 500,000 cars during the next 3-5 years.

This latest innovation is meant to alert drivers if they aren’t spending “enough time” looking at things such as mirrors or the road. Two Tech companies, Seeing Machines and Takata will work together to deliver the in-car devices to GM for use in their fleet. Ken Kroeger, CEO of Seeing Machines, envisions safer roads in the future due in large part to this partnership. “One of the reasons we partnered with Takata was because we share a vision of roads without accidents,” Kroeger explained. “Takata’s safety products like seatbelts save lives but, as Takata says, nothing is better than preventing accidents from happening in the first place. They’ve been working with carmakers around the world for decades. In the next decade millions of cars will be fitted with our driver fatigue and distraction detection technology thanks to our partnership.”

According to the Daily Mail, these in-car systems start and end with cameras. “Cameras fitted in the cars will be backed by algorithms that can identify features of drivers’ faces,” the Daily Mail reported. “The technology will then impose this information on a three-dimensional map of the interior of the car to determine what the driver is looking at. It will also be able to measure the rotation of the head so they can alert drivers if they are not spending enough time looking in areas such as the rear-view mirror.” This system, which watches drivers, has been created in the name of safety.

This push for safety isn’t without its concerns. This new technology raises major questions about privacy. What will the devices do with the information about their drivers? Although early reports indicate that the devices will not store or transmit the data, what will happen in 10 years? Will drivers be fined in the future for not looking at their mirrors enough? It’s likely that many will wonder if this is going too far. Can drivers be micro-managed out of accidents? Like V2V technology, how will car hacking impact these systems? There are a lot of questions that General Motors will need to answer if they want the public to accept this technology in 500,000 vehicles. We will follow this important story as updates become available in the coming days and weeks.