There are quite a few accidents where a driver falls asleep at the wheel, or has some medical problem that causes the driver to loose control of the vehicle. Our technology is not quite good enough for a general autonomous vehicle but certainly it is good enough for an autonomous “slow down, pull over, and stop”. Even if it is not very smart, even if it just slows down in the middle of the freeway with its flashers on, certainly that would be better then veering into a car next to you, or on-coming traffic.Maybe the technology would not be so useful for passenger cars, but could be used effectively in trucks?
Of course all that is probably trivial to do. The hard part? Figuring out if the driver is incapacitated. Dead man’s switch? A camera that watches the driver, and makes sure his eyes are on the road?
How cool would that be, anyway. Monitor head movement and eye position. sound an alarm if you start to doze off.
Falling asleep a the wheel – http://www.drivers.com/article/680/