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NEWS
Active safety takes the reins
Car importers announce progressive safety advances the same week seven people died on NSW roadsUPDATE 06/09/2013: Volkswagen has pointed out its Golf 90TSI Comfortline, priced from $24,990, is available with a Driver Assist Pack ($1300) that includes adaptive cruise control, making such autonomous vehicle technology available for less than $30,000.
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Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Honda have all declared that they're ramping up their use of sensor systems for a multitude of safety and convenience ends.
Their respective announcements were made last week, the same week that saw seven people killed on NSW roads alone – in just one day. Police attributed six of the seven fatalities to human error, with wide coverage given to a Sydney woman allegedly on the phone as she left the road and struck a tree.
It's events like those that drive the car industry's current and future safety initiatives – such as the radar sensors, lasers and cameras that are precursors to vehicle autonomy, but in the short term serve to augment drivers' senses and improve situational awareness.
Volkswagen plans to "democratise safety technology" with its "Vision Zero" concept, through which it will roll out ten separate sensor-based technologies across its line-up, starting in 2014. These include 360-degree camera systems; Car2X wifi systems for inter-vehicle communications and an expansion of its park assist systems to include parking with trailers.
Also included is an extension to existing blind-spot monitoring systems to detect an impending rear-end collision and prepare for impact by pretensioning seatbelts, closing windows and optimising seat positions to minimise injury. A very similar system has already been developed by Mercedes-Benz for that company's S-Class, but the VW initiative will introduce the concept to buyers of lower-price cars. Similarly, and still downstream from pioneer Volvo, VW's remote control parking system, operated via a smartphone app, will allow parking in ever narrower spaces.
While its aim is to bring advanced safety to the masses, Volkswagen isn't the first to introduce such technologies to the volume-selling end of the market. In fact, new safety technology has been cascading downmarket increasingly through the last several years.
In just four years, self-parking systems have dropped from the rarefied realms of Lexus's $200K-plus LS limo to sub-$40K models like the Ford Focus. And in just a couple of years, adaptive cruise control packages have made their way down from $100K-plus models to $50K-and-under models like Ford's second-gen Kuga and some Subarus.
Honda, too, already offers a number of sensor technologies in its larger models. Various Accord models launched here in Q2 this year use the company's LaneWatch blind-spot monitoring and the Advanced Driver Assist System (ADAS), which bundles adaptive cruise, lane-keeping and auto-braking systems with automatic front seatbelt pretensioning.
This week, the company gave demonstrations in the US of two new systems designed to make life safer for pedestrians and motorcyclists.
In the US, in cahoots with the federal Department of Transportation, it's been working on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) systems as a partner in the DoT's Connected Vehicle Safety Pilot Program.
Its vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) package works via an app on the pedestrian's smartphone which provides position, direction and speed details, and connects with nearby vehicles via the Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) wireless protocol. When they detect the likelihood of collision, vehicle and phone alert their humans with beeps and screen warnings. The system is all the more useful for its ability to detect and alert each party at times when they're not yet visible to each other, for example when a pedestrian is about to step out on to the road from behind a bus.
And a vehicle-to-motorcycle (V2M) system uses the same technologies to give motorcyclists visibility even when they're hidden from direct view behind other vehicles.
Nissan's upcoming 360 event in California, marking its 80th birthday, will give extensive exposure to its new Safety Shield system. The Japanese giant's express aim for the technology is "to halve the number of fatal and serious injuries involving Nissan vehicles in Japan by 2015".
Perhaps the best defined early precursor package to autonomy, Safety Shield sets up a kind of sensory forcefield around the car, dividing its duties into six distinct phases: Risk has not yet appeared; Risk has appeared; Crash may occur; Crash is unavoidable; Crash and Post-crash.
First up, systems like adaptive cruise and top-view monitoring help settle the car in with dynamic traffic conditions and minimise risk in motion. When risk arises, primary safety systems covering lane departure, blind-spot monitoring activate to get things back on track again.
As the level of risk increases, all the now industry standard chassis and brake electronics kick in to avert impact. When the systems sense a crash is inevitable, they pretension the seatbelts and prime the brakes. Take it as read that the system will eventually extend to autonomous emergency braking (AEB).
During impact, active secondary safety systems like airbags and anti-whiplash head restraints do their bit to minimise the human damage. The package extends to what might be viewed as tertiary safety with the ability to automatically alert emergency services, much like Ford's SYNC.
While Nissan conceived the system for use without external connection, it's also ready to hitch up to GPS systems, adding a massive new operational dimension.
Mercedes-Benz, always at the pointy end of the industry on advanced safety systems, has declared without caveat that its new S Class sets new safety benchmarks with a vast "intelligent drive" system using 26 sensors and a Pentagon's worth of computing power to help ready it even for incursion by cross traffic. Like Rolls-Royce's Wraith coupe, the S will have the ability to hook up its drivetrain directly to its GPS, allowing it to map the road ahead and work up a drive strategy as it goes.
The company also announced in the last week that its Vito and Sprinter LCV ranges, including MPV variants, will benefit from a raft of new sensor technologies.
Requirements for standards and massive upgrades to public and private infrastructure around the world mean vehicle autonomy is some years away – most likely well beyond 2020, by which time Nissan has said it will have appropriately equipped vehicles ready for sale.
But while governments and the mass of other stakeholders lumber into action to ready the roads for it, we won't have to wait that long to reap the benefits of the biggest advance in motoring safety since the arrival of the horseless carriage more than a century ago.
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Written byJeremy Bass
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