Teaching Driverless Cars to Fit Your Human Driving Style

Here's the scene that was scaring people: It was a driverless-car test run in Germany on a perfectly straight road with a medieval gate up ahead. The gate was a tight squeeze, and a regular driver would slow down to a crawl to make sure the car fit. But the driverless car made the calculations ahead of time and knew it had enough space, so it cruised along at the speed limit, maybe 30 m.p.h. And as it got closer to the gate, with no signs of slowing down, the passengers lost it.

"It's perfectly fine and safe, but the people inside the car, they basically freak out in these situations," says Dietmar Rabel, head of automated driving product management for HERE, an arm of Nokia that's developing data tools to help car companies make driverless cars. "This was the start of this idea that we really need to look at how people really drive in the real world."