Before I got a car with cruise control, I thought, "Cute toy, but what's the point?" It wasn't until my first >4 hour drive using it that I finally got the point.
The benefit, at least the way I use it, is not that one can continue driving when tired, but that one can drive longer before becoming tired. And I agree that it's important never to become uninvolved in the act of driving -- I'm still paying attention to my speed, as well as everything else; I'm just relieved of the burden of constantly tweaking it until I observe a situation that requires my intervention.
As for the grocery bag scenario, I'd want to do a whole lot of testing on any design+algorithm I came up with, to be sure problems like that had been solved, and it'd still have to have instant manual override the moment the driver touched a control.
(no subject)
The benefit, at least the way I use it, is not that one can continue driving when tired, but that one can drive longer before becoming tired. And I agree that it's important never to become uninvolved in the act of driving -- I'm still paying attention to my speed, as well as everything else; I'm just relieved of the burden of constantly tweaking it until I observe a situation that requires my intervention.
As for the grocery bag scenario, I'd want to do a whole lot of testing on any design+algorithm I came up with, to be sure problems like that had been solved, and it'd still have to have instant manual override the moment the driver touched a control.