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EE|Times has a great article/interview about mode confusion, with semi-autonomous driving (safety?) features. These are showing up in more and more new cars, for one example, automatic lane keeping. Sometimes the system is working, other times not and, according to the article the distinction is frequently not at all obvious to the driver. https://www.eetimes.com/mode-confusion-vexes-drivers-carmakers/ [eetimes.com]

NHTSA vs. NTSB
Curiously, regulators are more worried about the safety issues of fully autonomous vehicles than the more immediate concerns of safety for vehicles operating in partial autonomy.
The advanced notice of proposed rule making (ANPRM) recently issued by NHTSA seeks input from the public, as the agency plans to develop a framework for safety in Automated Driving Systems (ADS) — fully autonomous vehicles.
Last week, NTSB, responding to ANPRM, made it abundantly clear that NTHSA should be first “incorporating into the safety framework the lessons learned from NTSB crash investigations.” By “lessons learned,” NTSB means their investigations of crashes that involved vehicles operating in partial automated mode.
Describing driver/operator attention as “an integral component of lower level automation systems,” NTSB stressed that “a driver monitoring system must be able to assess whether and to what degree the driver is performing the role of automation supervisor.”

Further down, there is an interview with an ex-F-18 pilot who tells of a fellow pilot who experienced mode confusion first hand:

Cummings: I saw this firsthand when one of my peers was returning from a live weapons area to the aircraft carrier, and he forgot to save his weapons.

Right before he got back, his commanding officer in the other plane decided that they would do a fun one-v.-one, which is like a dogfight. My friend, I like to call him Spider (not his real call sign), got the jump on the commanding officer and got in position to fire. There’s this really compelling shoot queue. So, the system will scream at you to shoot. But you needed to make sure the letters “SIM” were beneath, to show you were in simulated mode. Right? But he didn’t double-check. He thought, in his mind, he was in simulated mode. And the font [for SIM] was so small.

And when you’re doing a dogfight, it’s really rough. He pulled the trigger, thinking he was in stimulated mode. The missile went off the rail.

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