The Highway Is a Pasture

Description and use

Longplay dynamically adapts Spotify playlists using vehicle telemetry to reduce driver monotony and improve subjective experience, though objective safety benefits remain unverified.

Problem

Drivers experience monotony on long highway trips, leading to attention drift and potential safety risks. The challenge is to keep drivers engaged without adding distraction.

Outcome

The system appeared to improve the subjective driving experience by adapting music to context, especially during traffic jams and night drives. No objective safety metrics were collected, so effectiveness on attention or crash risk remains unproven.

Workflow

• Read telemetry from Tesla Fleet API (read‑only).
• Compute pace trend, ETA trend, journey phase, and moments (e.g., border crossing).
• Generate deterministic musical brief based on weighted factors (confidence, contextFit, telemetryFit, tasteFit, diversityGain, novelty, fatiguePenalty).
• Use language model to propose candidate tracks matching the brief.
• Resolve candidates via Spotify API and score deterministically.
• Append selected tracks to the Spotify playback queue without interrupting current song.

Evidence

In traffic jams, the selection seemed to lower aggression and make the situation easier to tolerate.

Preferred music may limit reported driver stress in highly congested traffic, while making little difference under low congestion.

Source

Music may change the experience of fatigue without reliably changing the underlying impairment.

Source