The driver and his car form an indivisible system. The behaviour of the car affects the behaviour of the driver and the behaviour of the latter, in its turn, affects the performance of the car. We thus have a feed-back circuit composed of a man and a machine. Principles of mathematics and biology are applied to the study of this man-machine system. It is shown that some biological characteristics of the driver impose an upper safe speed limit, even if we conceive of an abstract situation of a single car on a perfectly empty road. This upper safe limit depends however, also on the design of the car. In certain respects, it is impossible to separate the effect of the driver from that of the car. Practical conclusions for driving safety are derived. Reprinted from Progress in Biocybernetics, Volume 1, edited by Norbert Wiener and J.P. Schade, Cluer Publishing Company, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1964.
Samenvatting