Driving Safety Research Institute

We're partnering with PAVE Campaign for their virtual panel "All AVs Are Local: Iowa's Automated Rural Shuttle" on Wednesday, Feb. 2, at 1 p.m. CT! Join our own Dan McGehee and Omar Ahmad as they discuss our ADS for Rural America automated shuttle project, with a recording available after Feb. 2.

Knowing if you’re too impaired to drive due to cannabis use is not nearly as straightforward as it is from alcohol use. Finding a way to measure this is a topic of some of our ongoing research.

See what we’ve been up to in the past year in our NADS Annual Report, with stories about ADS for Rural America, driving drowsy, regenerative braking safety benefits, cannabis and driving, and more. 

The ADS for Rural America project launched in October 2021 and has completed its first phase of data collection. See an example map and learn more about the roles of the safety driver and co-pilot.

Ben Berhow and Wil Comer—two seniors majoring in mechanical engineering at the University of Iowa—both landed part-time jobs with the miniSim team at the National Advanced Driving Simulator this past year, giving them valuable on-the-job experience. 

In an important step toward identifying who is too impaired to drive due to cannabis use, a team of researchers from the University of Iowa and Advanced Brain Monitoring found there are specific markers in brain activity linked to cannabis intoxication that consistently and negatively impact driving performance.