Automotive sensing technologies and the automation of space: The case of Subaru EyeSight

While a great deal of critical attention has been focused on the experimental use of automotive sensing technologies within electronic vehicle development, their integration into production cars continues apace. Despite a long history of incorporating vision and other automated sensing systems into production cars, we are yet to fully appreciate how these ‘smart objects’ function and interoperate, how ‘observable’ these systems are (Rieder and Hofmann, 2020), what roles they play in shaping our day-to-day experiences of the automation of automotive space. In this article, we examine the vision-sensing capacities of one proprietary in-vehicle computer vision system (Subaru EyeSight) and how its visual sensors operate and interoperate to form a unified ADAS (advanced driver assistance system) accident mitigation system. In particular, we seek to understand the forms of driver-to-vehicle handover that modern ADAS facilitate and require. Drawing on social scientist James Ash’s concept of ‘phase space’, and cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby’s earlier conception of ‘phase-space’, our contention in this article is that ADAS like EyeSight actively intervenes in and reconfigures automotive space. We detail how EyeSight’s automated vision sensors and decision-making system reshapes how automotive space is viewed, understood, and acted upon, with implications for those behind the wheel.