Ann Arbor, Michigan - She Who Must be Obeyed has a four-word classification for self-driving cars: "Over my dead body!"
As she rightly points out, she suffers from motion sickness if she's not the one doing the driving, also making the point that a significant number of people experience the same problem if they do the sort of things in a car that people do when they travel by bus, air or rail: reading, texting, watching videos, playing games or working.
And she's not the only one who thinks this could become an issue as autonomous vehicles go mainstream. Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle of the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute asked more than 3200 adults in the United States, India, China, Japan, Britain and Australia how they would use their time when travelling in a fully self-driving vehicle.
The result? More than a third of American respondents said they would be doing things that are known to increase the likelihood and severity of motion sickness, and more than half of Indians, 40 percent of Chinese and 26-30 percent of adults in Japan, Britain and Australia say they would be sitting with their heads down, focusing on a small, brightly-coloured object (a screen or a printed page) inside the vehicle - a classic recipe for nausea.
Given that the incidence of motion sickness under normal conditions is well documented, Sivak and Schoettle concluded that about 6-12 percent of adults riding in fully self-driving vehicles would be expected to experience moderate or severe motion sickness at some time.
CONTRIBUTING FACTORS
Sivak explained: "Motion sickness is expected to be more of an issue in self-driving vehicles than in conventional vehicles, because the three main contributing factors - conflict between vision and balance, inability to anticipate the direction of movement and, along with that, lack of control over the direction of motion - are much higher in autonomous cars."
But, he pointed out, the frequency and severity of motion sickness depends on what you're doing. About three out of five respondents across the US, China, Britain and Australia (and a slightly lower percentage in India) said they'd be watching the road, talking on the phone with their eyes focused outside the car, or sleeping - all of which are known to alleviate motion sickness.
The conclusion: Sivak and Schoettle suggest carmakers build self-driving cars with big transparent windows to attract passengers' eyes outside, use high-mounted transparent video screens (think head-up display) placed so that passenger have to face in the direction of travel to watch them, restrict head movement (ask any racing driver about that one!), forget about swivel seats and instead make them fully reclining.
It's ironic that autonomous cars, which were once expected to take the human factor out of driving, may instead give rise to a whole new set of very human design problems.