ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a trucker's dilemma in a driving emergency on an icy rural two-lane highway. Two commercial motor vehicles drove at each other for several seconds at a relatively high rate of speed without indication from either driver about their intended respective movements. Nevertheless, the possibility of high-speed commercial motor vehicles being somehow programmed to avoid head-on collisions is intriguing. Collision reconstruction analyses indicated that both vehicles were in the same westbound lane as late as one-to-two seconds prior to impact, leaving insufficient time for either driver to prevent the collision. The Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) issues in the case concerned the topics of human performance and driver error in emergency situations. The HFE analysis was grounded in the scientific knowledge on information processing and aspects of human performance and driving at issue in the litigation. The HFE expert assumed that attention is a limited cognitive resource that is inherently demanded while driving.
