The main feeling I have as I’m sitting at my home desk, reviewing the event in Detroit last week, is how many new people I met. I spent some time reaching out on LinkedIn to all the speakers, and probably 90% were people I was not previously connected with.
The agenda had a really fresh feel to it this year, and of course there were some familiar faces, especially on the AutoSens side for me, since that’s where most of my history is, but I met so many new people last week and I suspect I was far from alone in that!
Rob Stead
Founder
Sense Media
AutoSens and InCabin USA brought together industry leaders across ADAS, autonomous driving, and in-cabin technology for another landmark week and what a week it was.
User acceptability remains the critical element, as far as I’m concerned. We heard interesting discussions from PAVE, MNDoT, and IIHS about the broader regulatory and public education space, with many influential touch-points mentioned, and needs identified.
We heard from Waymo about their latest sensor stack, which has an incredible amount of redundancy built in, handles extreme weather and edge-cases very well and will only continue to get better.
There were a plethora of sensor innovations from companies across camera, radar, lidar, tactile, ToF, and more, while the compute and architecture discussion has moved on firmly from SDV to AIDV as the whole sector grapples with how to adopt and integrate the latest AI capabilities, both into their products and their company processes.
We also saw the discussion on in-cabin technology move from sensing into understanding and engagement. Not just how we can sense the occupants, but how we can understand what’s going on in the scene, the intent of the driver and passengers, for example how to determine if the driver is in a cognitive state to take over responsibility for the driving task.
This involves a subtle layering of multi-modal sensing and behavioural prediction, but it also requires a range of outputs to engage the “sensors” of the human driver and there was a lot of interesting discussion on how this could involve different modes such as audio, haptic, visual, and touch, as well as the strategy behind these interventions: high intensity alerts, or gentle raising of awareness.
But after all of that, we can regulate effectively and establish standards; we can educate the public about AV technology and its capabilities and benefits; we can create cheaper, faster, more sensitive sensors; we can build optimised architectures; we can plug it all together with super-fast networking; but if we don’t fully consider the UX and design a faultless UI, we hand the customer a reason to walk away from the safety features we’ve worked so hard to build.
Looking Ahead
That’s a wrap, but we are already working on the next edition – and in the meantime don’t miss AutoSens Europe, taking place in Barcelona from 22-24 September and AutoSens China, in Hefei from 24-26 November. If you’re not able to join us there, we’ll also be back in Detroit for AutoSens USA 2027 next May!
Interested in in-cabin monitoring technology?
With a pass to AutoSens Europe, you’ll also get full access to our co-located sister event, InCabin. See the Agenda for InCabin Europe here >>
See who you missed at AutoSens USA 2026 ⬇
