Self Driven Ferrari

A former F1 Ferrari Engineer believes that he has found the key to self driving car technology. Christiaan Erik, the engineer, spent a majority of the early 2000's designing Ferraris, working with vehicle dynamics and simulators, helping Ferrari to be one of the fastest supercars in F1 Racing.
Erik believes that a gaze-tracking software could be the key to a self driving technology. "You can't do steady state approximations; you have to do something much more realistic. It's really the dynamics and the fact that it's a transient non-linear machine on the limit, and there aren't two fractions of a second where the car is on the limit doing the same thing,"

Erik has been working on the programming of this autonomous car, saying that it is much more difficult with many more factors to take into consideration. "To be successful in a technology startup, you have to bring something that's more advanced than the state of the art. More than likely, you're going to have to repeatedly invent something new, so invention needs to be a process. A lot of times now, you see startups that think you can base your whole startup on one brainstorming session and then hack around it. For technology, you have to really do proper engineering methods"

He addresses the old thought that no matter what technology takes command, there is nothing better than a human at the driver seat to deal with any circumstances. However, he is programming the car to deal with any outliers; a person crossing the street, construction, a car driving to fast. He says that a human in an autonomous car would play a "motherly" role, telling the car what to do. It would give suggestions to the car, of which the car would take into account. The gaze tracking technology would help for the car to take these suggestions into account, such as if the suggestion was "look out", the car could sense and find the danger that was presented. He is working with the company Cogisen, which, with a helpful grant from the European Union, has created some useful gaze tracking systems to begin working off of.