Tyler Szymkowski was part of the team whose task it was to improve Nissan's ProPilot Assist system (stop-and-go function), after many customers were dissatisfied with his action.
The system allows the vehicle to stop and start autonomously in a traffic jam, but if the vehicle was stationary for more than three seconds, the system would deactivate, forcing human intervention to reactivate it, pressing lightly on the accelerator.
The system needed to allow more downtime without turning it off, but how much more?
Enter the intern engineer Tyler Szymkowski, who was sent, in 2018, to the most congested cities in the USA (Los Angeles, Washington, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and San Francisco) to collect data. He's been in 64 traffic jams, even having an app to let him know when the best time is to… get stuck in traffic.
Result? He found that the stopping time between the “stop” and the “start” was much longer, which led to a fixed time of 30 seconds, 10 times longer. The time “lost” by Szymkowski made the system better for all users.
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