Irreversible Takeover Blackout Intervals in Autonomous Vehicle Handoffs

Certain mixed-control autonomous driving systems impose a non-negotiable cognitive and temporal boundary during automation disengagement, beyond which human drivers cannot safely intervene—regardless of training, warnings, or intent.

What This Work Exposes

This entry identifies and formalizes the Takeover Blackout Interval (TBI): a finite, irreducible time window immediately following automation disengagement during which a human driver is physiologically incapable of reconstructing situational context quickly enough to execute safe, corrective control.

These blackout intervals are not edge cases, negligence, or design flaws. They arise from the interaction between automation-induced context loss and immutable human cognitive recovery limits.

Enforced Constraint

Reality enforces a hard boundary at the level of human cognitive state-reconstruction speed during autonomous vehicle handoff. Once automation disengagement coincides with insufficient time for context recovery, safe intervention becomes physically impossible.

Exact Scale Where the Boundary Is Enforced

Biological / cognitive / temporal. The limit is set by human perception, recognition, decision formation, and motor planning latency under surprise and compressed time.

Why Prevailing Approaches Fail

  • They assume human supervision is continuously recoverable.
  • They treat takeover as an instantaneous or near-instantaneous event.
  • They frame failure as behavioral (“driver inattention”) rather than physiological.
  • They rely on alerts and warnings that cannot compress human recovery time below biological limits.

These approaches buffer surface risk but do not—and cannot—remove the blackout interval.

What Practice Refuses to Admit

  • There exist handoff intervals where no human action can succeed.
  • Longer automation engagement increases—not decreases—latent takeover risk.
  • Responsibility assignment during TBIs is structurally incoherent.

Time Horizon

  • Scientific validity: Immediate
  • Experimental confirmation: Short-cycle (weeks to months)
  • Operational adoption: Long-term, politically resistant

Relation to Other Work

This constraint mirrors irreducible handoff failures documented in:

Governance

This entry does not propose solutions, products, or regulatory changes. Its sole function is to surface an enforced boundary misclassified by existing safety narratives.

Published as part of the Edge of Practice. Fixed at publication. Revision requires explicit versioning.