Swedes Develop Systems to Scold, Shake Sleepy Drivers Awake

I’ve never understood what’s so difficult about staying on your own side of the road. Yet every year, hundreds of thousands of motorists insist on veering into the oncoming lane, causing horrendous carnage and maiming and killing themselves and others. A good portion of these people, it turns out, are asleep. The NHTSA reports an estimated 100,000 sleep-related crashes a year in the US, and in a terrifying poll on msnbc, at last count, 64% of respondents reported having fallen asleep at the wheel. Apparently it’s not bad enough that our roads are full of idiotic drivers—now it turns out that we can’t even count on them to be conscious. Ugh. Enter Saab and Volvo, ever at the forefront of automotive safety, now developing eye- and face-scanning devices to monitor and correct driver drowsiness. Forbes Autos reports that Saab’s driver-inattention package will use a pair of infrared cameras to monitor eye movement, and a dashboard display that chimes and flashes a series of increasingly severe warnings each time the eyelids slip closed. Moreover, the driver’s seat will sternly vibrate if the system notices the driver’s head oriented toward anything other than the "primary attention zone." Volvo takes a gentler approach, monitoring the vehicle’s movement in relation to lane markers and cheerfully warning the driver with an icon of a steaming cup of coffee any time the vehicle leaves its lane without signaling. I really don’t know if this is all going to be enough to thwart the most ambitiously sleepy drivers; maybe electric shocks would do a better job.