We already trust technology to do our banking and broadcast our personal lives, but do we trust it to get us into difficult parking spots and ultimately to drive our cars?
AT AN OLD military airbase in rural Germany we get a glimpse of the future. Or at least the future through the eyes of BMW’s engineers. And if you’re enthused by the move from combustion engines to electricity, then you’ll love what the future holds..
Just how much we will end up trusting our lives to technology in the future is really anyone’s guess. We already do our banking over the internet and we broadcast much of our lives on Facebook and Twitter. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Google has joined the race to develop the world’s first driverless car, claiming its fleet of computer-controlled vehicles has already covered more than 200,000 kilometres. The internet giant is not alone in developing an autonomous car – Volkswagen and General Motors have been doing this for years now.
Many big-name car firms regularly compete in the Darpa Challenge, a competition created by the US Department of Defence for autonomous cars. These vehicles, which match very detailed Sat-Nav maps with on-board sensors, have made massive improvements in the last decade.
Already several car firms offer models that automatically park themselves. The driver simply controls the brakes and the car steers itself into the vacant slot, which it identifies using the parking sensors.
As for automatic emergency braking, Volvo currently offer a pedestrian protection system that applies full braking if it’s onboard computer thinks a crash is inevitable. In fact Volvo is so confident of the technological advances ahead that it’s promising no one will be killed in or by one of their cars by 2020. Now that’s a bold claim in the current climate of global road deaths.
At BMW they’ve got a system that will even bring your car to a safe stop on a motorway if you have a heart attack at the wheel. And it doesn’t stop there.
Take the humble car key for instance. There are, we are told, many more things that you could do with your car key. NFC (Near Field Communication) is something you will have come across already if you have used a hotel room key card – the swipe cards you wave in front of the door lock to access your room. That same technology allows a variety of information to be applied to a car key fob. So, in theory, you could check into a hotel room on route via your Sat-Nav and access it with your car key. It could also replace your credit card.
As for pedestrian protection, while current systems use cameras to detect potential pedestrian crashes, Project Amulett aims to fit “at-risk” road users with coin-sized transponders on their jackets or shoes that emit electromagnetic waves detected by passing cars.
The increasing number of sensors in and around the car are being put to good use too. We’ve all been in a situation that you find a parking spot that will fit the car but will make it difficult for you to get out. No problem if you have remote controlled parking, which allows you to step out before the car manoeuvres autonomously into that narrow spot.
Perhaps the most impressive feature on display, however, was for heart attack victims.
Designed for drivers with a heart condition, the user wears a heart monitor when driving and in the event of a heart attack the car’s computer will take over. It uses the various sensors to monitor the surrounding traffic, takes over the steering and braking and guides the car to the side of the road before putting in an automated call to the emergency services that gives them a GPS location. In the demonstration, we sat at the steering wheel and took our hands and feet away from the controls, while our car eerily waited for a gap between the traffic (on a closed, controlled road) and pulled over.
Some of these systems require legislation before being used on public roads, but a safer and more integrated future is close at hand. And while these aren’t quite the autonomous car yet, it does show that the technology is edging one step closer to that time. Perhaps Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said it best this week. “Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense”.
