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In order to meet increasing demands for safety and comfort in a vehicle compartment, automatic adjustment of seat, mirrors, steering wheel has been developed. The multiplex wiring system was constructed for the automatic adjustment of the cockpit elements to drivers preferred positions or to physique-matched settings based on ergonomic data. This paper describes the construction of the multiplex system and functions of automatic adjustment of the cockpit elements for comfortable driving position and better visibility.

This paper concerns driver's burden for visual information processing in which his central vision is coupled with his peripheral one. A visual driving simulator was applied to the first step of the study, where driver's responses to both central and peripheral tasks were simultaneously investigated. The series of test indicate that the driver's responsiveness to the central and peripheral tasks could define the whole burden for visual information processing. Therefore, it appears that the responsiveness to the peripheral vision could be more or less compromised to support the central one.

One of the leading causes of traffic accidents is the reduction of driver's arousal level. Only a driver with an appropriate arousal level can drive an automobile properly. The purpose of this research is to find the possibility of quantifying the reduction of this arousal level. Two methods are used to quantify the reduction in arousal level: one is related to the driver's behavior, and the other is related to his physiological status. The characteristics of controlling the steering wheel are used as indicators of the driver's behavior, which represents the status of information processing in the brain. The variation of heart rate is used as an indicator of physiological status, which could directly represent arousal level related to drowsiness. Eight male and two female drivers participate both in on-the-road tests for the characteristics of controlling the steering wheel and in a test with a driving simulator for the heart rate variation.

A Vehicle Vibration Control System by Active Control has been developed. The experimental results using a 4-cylinder gasoline engine installed in a car showed that at the position of the driver's seat, the acceleration of the vibration was reduced by 16 dB. This system operates stably and at low cost because of having a feedforward system, so many applications can be expected in the near future as methods for vehicle vibration reduction.

Various parameters for the shift scheduling of an automatic transmission were examined to detect more accurate road conditions, vehicle running conditions, and the driver's intention. The parameters include the vehicle speed, the gradient of a road, an index to curves in the road, and so on. The fuzzy logic was employed to incorporate these parameters into the shift scheduling control. The vehicle running tests have shown that the use of many parameters and the fuzzy logic was effective on reducing the frequencies of the transmission gear shift and the driver's brake operation in such road conditions as usually seen in mountainous areas