Festschrift in honour of Professor Neville Stanton: A lone crusader in a world of driving simulators

Abstract The automotive future has always pointed to a world of intelligent co-pilots and robot cars, but perhaps no more so than Knight Rider. In this 1980's television series the fictional Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT) was a supercomputer on wheels with 1000 megabytes of memory. The protagonist was Michael Knight, a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent and the helpless. This was a shadowy flight into the trials and tribulations of different levels of automation, re-claiming control when automation failed, and a wilful, chatty computer co-driver. An amusing metaphor, perhaps, for the research impact made by Neville Stanton in the field of vehicle automation. Without question – to paraphrase the Knight Rider outro – “one man can make a difference”. This festschrift in Neville's honour tells the story of how.