Need a wake-up call at the wheel? Now your car will help you out
New technology also aims to bring TV and push-button braking to cars.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DETROIT -- It's just past midnight. Highway traffic is sparse and you're on the road, drowsy from a long day.
Your eyelids start to droop and instead closing for a blink they shut for almost a full second and drift open.
Zip. Your seat belt tightens against your chest. Thump, thump, thump. It taps on your left shoulder with a wake-up call.
The technology is what the auto industry calls an active safety system, which aims to prevent accidents using sensors, cameras, alerts and in some cases brakes and steering to avoid a collision.
Troy, Mich.-based Delphi Corp. demonstrated the seat-belt technology, fitted in a Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicle, during Convergence 2004, an industry conference at Detroit's Cobo Center for automotive electronics.
While safety was the main draw at the conference last week, it also featured the latest in audio technology and computerized braking and steering.
Projection
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said upcoming safety technology could decrease the number of crashes caused by driver distraction, lane changes and rear-end accidents by 1 million annually.
"The hope is that the occupant will pay attention and take heed," said Joseph Kanianthra, NHTSA's associate administrator for vehicle safety research.
In addition to seat belts and air bags to prevent injuries in a crash, some cars already use adaptive cruise control that automatically adjusts a car's speed to maintain its distance from the vehicle in front of it.
Stability control
They are also using stability control systems, which sense when a vehicle is veering off the road and applies brakes to counter it. The technology is already prevalent in Europe and is becoming more common in the United States. A NHTSA study released last month said a stability control system could prevent rollover accidents.
"That's the sort of technology I see doubling every year," said Philip Headley, chief engineer for advanced technologies at Auburn Hills, Mich.-based Continental Automotive Systems, which makes stability systems.
But technology that drivers can see will be slower to come, such as a camera in the rear bumper with a dash-mounted screen that shows what's behind the car.
For Ford Motor Co., that technology is at least three years away, said Ron Miller, technical leader at Ford's research and advanced engineering in Dearborn, Mich.
That is also the timeline for technology that detects drowsiness with a camera in the instrument panel. When the driver's eyes look away from the road or close for too long, it sends an alert, like the seat belt tap.
Delphi is talking to trucking companies about the technology and expects to see it in commercial trucks next year and available to the general public by 2008.
While automakers are interested, there are a few issues keeping the technology from catching on quickly.
Standardization
Automakers want to standardize the warnings before the technology becomes more common, Miller said. That will mean the seat belt shoulder tap used to wake a driver up in a Ford Escape is the same alert used in a Chevrolet Malibu.
Automakers also need to be sure it works right.
"It must warn only in the appropriate cases and not false alarms," Kanianthra said. "If this doesn't work exactly the way it's supposed to, somebody could argue that it is what caused [a] crash rather than prevented it."
Also at Convergence:
Soon, your car stereo will have a hard drive that can hold all your music, just like an MP3 player.
"It does away with you having to reload the CD changer," said Andrew Robertson, a spokesman for Philips Semiconductors.
Wireless technology allows the driver to load the songs from a home computer onto a hard drive in a car.
A Delphi system can hold at least 1,600 songs on 20 gigabytes of space. By next year, the company expects to produce systems with 30 to 40 gigabytes of space, said Keenan Estese, an engineer with Delphi.
MP3 stereo systems are just the start of new mobile entertainment. Some cars already have screens for back-seat passengers, but television is the goal.
It will be tricky to implement, Robertson said. Researchers are trying to find ways to maintain a signal and make the technology affordable.
Eventually drivers will be able to brake by pushing a button instead of pressing the brake pedal.
The makers of semiconductors are developing ways to replace mechanical braking and steering systems with computerized systems.
The technology uses the sensors that already making their way into vehicles and semiconductors to communicate what the driver wants to the car's computer.
"You won't need the steering wheel. You can use a joystick. You can use a mouse if you like," Robertson said.