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| Active safety |
March 9, 2007 |
While crash test dummies still plow into dashboards, new technology aims to avoid the crash altogether
By Michael Bettencourt,
Gothenburg, Sweden
Sitting in an observatory deep within Volvo’s advanced safety centre in Sweden’s second-largest city, the anticipation of a dramatic crash test tingles the senses. Super bright spotlights create greater-than-daylight clarity for the path of the motorized sled that will soon pull a bright orange Volvo S80 sedan to its doom. High-speed video cameras focus on the point of impact. A 10-second countdown begins.
“Three, two, one…” and then there’s a whoosh sound and the car starts moving. Two crash test dummies have had their heads covered with skin-coloured powder and lipstick, so Volvo’s team of safety engineers can see exactly where the massive frontal impact will throw the mannequins’ heads into the car’s front airbags.
The sound of the crash, a sickly bang of crushing glass, crunching sheet metal and exploding airbags, is over in an instant. “You never get used to that sound,” said one Volvo safety researcher, “no matter how many times you hear it.”
That sound is more than 2,000 kilograms of metal and glass colliding with an 800-tonne concrete barrier at 65 km/h, well above the current government requirements of any country, but well below the 120 km/h maximum capability of the system. When asked why crash tests are not conducted at real-world highway speeds, Thomas Broberg, deputy director for Volvo’s traffic accident research team, nods toward the immense concrete block.
“In the real world, even in a high-speed crash, any object a car hits is likely to transfer some of its momentum into forward motion or give,” Broberg said. “With that barrier, there is no give.” The resultant impact at 65 km/h is comparable to real-world highway speeds.
Crash avoidance
This type of passive safety testing has been the basis for many of the safety features within new cars, including seat belts, padded dashboards, head restraints and airbags. Yet ever since the three-point belt was introduced in 1959, further crash safety advances have provided proportionately less protection and more in the way of complexity and cost. Automobile safety researchers have realized most of the low-hanging fruit of the passive safety world has been picked. While legislative crash standards ensure this type of testing will continue, research now focuses on the new auto safety frontier: active safety, or technology that avoids crashes.
“Today we focus on technologies that predict and prevent accidents from even occurring,” said Ingrid Skogsmo, director of the Volvo Cars Safety Centre. And not only is this technology resulting in new safety systems now appearing in various luxury brands, but such systems will become more proactive in the future, as automakers and car buyers become more comfortable with vehicles taking an increasing amount of control at the wheel.
The grandfathers of these types of systems are anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control that prevents skids by cutting back power and, if needed, braking individual wheels. This system will be mandatory on all North American passenger vehicles by the end of 2011.
But the state of the art has progressed much further than that. Both Audi and Volvo now offer a blind-spot warning system, which uses radar sensors and camera technology, respectively, embedded in the sides of the vehicles to detect when another vehicle enters the car’s blind spot. These systems flash a yellow caution light in the outside rear-view mirror to warn the driver. Volvo said it plans to extend the system to all its models, which means a price of entry of just more than $30,000.
Staying in the lane
Infiniti was the first brand in North America to offer a lane-departure warning system in 2005, which uses a camera in the rear-view mirror to “read” lane markings at highway speeds. Should the driver’s wheels
drift over these markings without the turn signal on, the system will sound a quick three-beep warning to alert the driver. It’s an eye-opening exercise to count how many times this beep goes off in normal
driving, and it does focus one’s mind on staying in the lane and always using the signal.
Volvo, smarting that other luxury brands had taken the lead in advanced safety technologies, gave a rare sneak peek at where it is heading with some of these safety technologies. It, too, is working on a lane-departure warning device, but further out it plans a system that first warns of lane wandering and, if no action is taken, automatically inputs corrective steering to get the car back in line.
Various luxury brands also offer active cruise control. These systems provide the basic technology to make the car “see” other vehicles on the road, and are the first step in other proximity safety advances. Now, when the cruise is on, radar sensors detect the closing speed of another vehicle directly in front and ease off the throttle to maintain a preset distance; some even tap the brakes.
On the S80, the new top-of-the-line Volvo sedan that goes on sale across Canada in March, the system also has a collision warning system which flags an impending collision with a flashing red light on the windshield and a loud beep to alert the driver; the brake pads also cinch up to the disc in preparation for emergency braking. If the pedal pressure is calculated by the collision warning system to be too light to stop the car in time, brake power is boosted automatically.
Volvo also discussed variations of this system that kick in when radar sensors detect the driver is not braking the car when needed. These would bring the car to a full stop. Volvo even demonstrated a prototype that could not only brake to a stop but could also swerve into a parallel lane to avoid contact. This is currently being tested using life-sized car-shaped balloons.
Car-to-car talk
Yet all these luxury-brand safety systems don’t mean mainstream manufacturers aren’t looking at other ways to keep people and vehicles from mashing each other. Five of the largest auto manufacturers in the world are cooperating in the U.S. to develop common standards for vehicle-to-vehicle communications that could help improve safety using global positioning satellites and intelligent transportation systems.
Ford, GM, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota and Honda are members of the Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership (CAMP) Vehicle Safety Communications 2 Consortium. The group has already developed a common platform for dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and secured a dedicated vehicle safety frequency band from the FCC. It also uses an advanced 802.11p wireless standard set aside strictly for vehicle communications, to help send messages back and forth betweens cars about speed, braking and direction.
So how would this help drivers in the real world? In a December demonstration of the system on public roads just outside Ford’s Research and Innovation Center in Dearborn, Mich., three cars with prototype DSRC systems were driven around the block, all of them equipped with a navigation-like screen that showed the intended path of the car, as well as that of the other V2V wireless-equipped cars ahead. At one point, with all three cars lined up in a row, the first car braked heavily, almost to a stop, at which point a red warning triangle appeared on the navigation system and a warning beep was heard even before the brake lights of the research car immediately in front lit up. Such an early warning is handy not only for foggy or snowy days, but also when a large SUV is driving in front of you.
Joe Stinnett, an engineer working on Ford’s V2V communications systems, said this type of system can also warn of vehicles in a car’s blind spot, and has some distinct advantages over current camera-based warning systems. “Cameras are expensive, and they have trouble seeing through ice and snow,” he said. “Once DSRC is implemented, you won’t need any cameras, but it requires that all cars on the road have this.”
Canada is working on its own intelligent transportation system, developed in alignment with American systems. However, the Canadian government is behind its American counterparts in designating part of the broadcast spectrum for vehicle-to-vehicle communications. This must be resolved first before DSRC and “safe smart” cars start improving safety here, according to a 2005 Transport Canada smart highway strategy report.
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