Too stressed too drive? Or too happy? Jaguar Land Rover and other automakers want to build vehicles that use AI and biometrics to assess and adjust to your mood. How luxurious. Or is it just creepy?

Jaguar Land Rover announced recently that they are working on biometric sensing and AI technology intended to assess your mood while you’re behind the wheel and, when you’re upset, angry, or stressed, adjust cabin settings to make you feel better.

Among the adjustments that Jaguar Land Rover says the vehicle could make are modifying cabin temperature and ambient lighting. Your Jag might even decide to put together a playlist of just the right selection of your favorite tunes to influence your mood for the better.

Cool, or creepy?

It all depends on your general point of view on the increasing penetration of technology into your automotive life.

For me, the enhanced photo that Jaguar Land Rover dropped with their press release doesn’t help matters much.

It’s a photo of a seemingly happy chap behind the wheel of a British luxury vehicle, with a superimposed image of what is presumably a graphical representation of a matrix that the under-development AI system would use for charting the position of facial muscles at key points to determine the driver’s mood.

Jaguar Land Rover isn’t the first or only automaker to announce that they are working on such technology.

In 2018, a team of authors that included Michael Braun of BMW Group Research published an article in the academic journal Multimodal Technologies and Interaction entitled “A Survey to Understand Emotional Situations on the Road and What They Mean for Affective Automotive UIs” (user interfaces).

In the article, the link of research on technology to assess driver emotional state and the transition from human-controlled driving to autonomous driving is clear, as the passage below illustrates:

We expect that understanding the drivers’ activities and state will be just as relevant or even more important for the upcoming age of highly automated driving as it is for manual driving. In particular when handing over control between car and driver (i.e., switching between different levels of automation), it is essential to have a detailed understanding of the driver state to appropriately support this handover.

These researchers also noted that it isn’t just stressed-out or unhappy moods that automotive AI technology needs to be on the lookout for: “Both negative but also exuberantly positive emotional states have been identified to strongly impact driving performance and to support unsafe driving.”

So, to put it in more simple terms, one day your car might have the authority to decide that you’re just too darned happy to drive.

Could laws against “driving while happy” soon become a thing?

Aside from luxury marques like Jaguar Land Rover and BMW, more accessible brands like Kia are also apparently playing in this sandbox.

Earlier this year, Top Gear reported on the unveiling at CES of technology for what Kia calls R.E.A.D. (Real-time Emotion Adaptive Driving).

Sorry, Jaguar Land Rover, BMW, and Kia, but I think I’ll pass—for as long as the marketplace and the legal environment surrounding vehicle ownership and operation still give me the choice of passing.

If I want my mood assessed, I want it to be my choice. And I don’t mind shelling out the bucks for a human therapist if I decide that I need one. But I don’t need my car to ask me how I feel about my mother.

My nicely analog daily driver from the 90s is looking better and better all the time in the face of all this “brave new world” gadgetry intruding into the automotive experience.