Finally, somebody is thinking about this properly.<p>I've been railing against the "deadly valley", automatic driving systems that are good enough that the driver stops actively paying attention, but not yet good enough to be trusted unwatched. Tesla's "autopilot" is in that category, or at least it was before they put more restrictions on it. VW is trying to figure out how to operate safely in the deadly valley.<p>This matters, a lot. Misunderstandings over who's doing what between cockpit automation and pilots are a major problem.[1] There are lots of modes, often too many. This will not work for cars; drivers don't get procedure training, simulator time, and check rides. The number of modes must be small, and it must be very clear to the driver what mode is engaged. VW's slightly retracted steering wheel makes this very explicit. That's clever.<p>Modeling the design after riding a horse on a loose or tight rein (the proper term is "collected") is interesting. But it's probably too much for a car. As a longtime rider who's had some good horses, I know what that feels like. I had a good Thoroughbred hunter teach me that. Trotting him up a switchback trail, I could either give him a loose rein, and let him work each tight turn his way, or collect him up, bend him around my leg, and control the turn myself. But I had to do one or the other; if I was unclear approaching a tight turn, he'd get through it, but not cleanly. Then he'd toss his head and snort, annoyed that I'd made him screw up. Some people might like that kind of relationship with car automation, but a lot of people won't be able to handle it.<p>(Military aircraft, though... DARPA is trying to figure this out for the F/A-18E Super Hornet, which is a single-seater with a serious cockpit workload problem. Sometimes the pilot needs to focus on weapons and targeting, and sometimes on flying the aircraft. Doing both at once causes at least one of those tasks to suffer.)<p>[1] <a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.571.7998&rep=rep1&type=pdf" rel="nofollow">http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.571...</a>