YOU PROBABLY think that in the future your car will be able to stop you from having a crash. That when some high-tech network of computers and sensors buried under the bonnet detects you’ve run out of talent, skill or luck, the car will take over, apply the brakes, tweak the steering and prevent the worst from happening.
You’d be wrong. This isn’t some sci-fi notion written into a footnote by Isaac Asimov in some book about robots: this is happening now – and it’s not even that expensive.
The EU will next year introduce legislation to make Electronic Stability Programme (ESP, also known as Vehicle Stability Control) standard on all new models. ESP already takes control of our cars in dangerous conditions, steering and controlling the vehicle by applying the brakes sequentially, and often doing so without the driver noticing.
It has been combined with systems that nudge the steering to return you to safety if you lose concentration and begin drifting across the road (available on the Volkswagen Passat, among others). It can even be used with a system that can apply the brakes if it detects a pedestrian stepping off the kerb in front of you (a Volvo creation).
So what’s next?
There are very real plans afoot to create cars that simply will not crash.
Volvo is at the forefront of this technology and recently made a startling claim that within a decade no one who drives a Volvo should be hurt in an accident. “Our aim is to build cars that do not crash,” says Jan Ivarsson, the company’s head of safety strategy. “By 2020 no one should be killed or even moderately injured in a Volvo.”
Even though Volvo qualifies this by saying it cannot foresee every eventuality and not safety system is entirely perfect, it’s still an astonishing claim.
To put it in perspective, Volvo sells 400,000 cars a year and plans to double that to 800,000 in the next few years. That’s 800,000 people buying a new car in which they will be incredibly unlucky to be even mildly hurt. Considering the World Health Organisation calculates 1.2 million people worldwide are killed in car crashes every year, that is a remarkable thought.
The next big step in car safety, according to Bosch, the German electronics giant that first developed ESP in the late 1990s, is to make the ESP system the central controller for all of the car’s dynamic systems: steering, brakes, suspension, airbags etc. Then, as with modern fly-by-wire aircraft, no command issued by the driver will be transmitted to the car unless the ESP system clears it.
It sounds excessive, Orwellian even, but it will happen so fast and so seamlessly that the driver’s control will almost never be affected, unless the worst happens, when the metaphorical electronic parachute will be deployed.
Subsequent to that, the next big advance will be getting cars to talk to one another. As high-end electronic systems proliferate, the logical step is to have cars broadcast information to one another across a simple lo-fi radio link. If you’ve had a skid on oil or ice, for instance, your car can warn others coming behind to alert the driver and pre-load the ESP system to compensate. Such a system could even be used to ease traffic jams.
After that it’s a matter of letting the cars do the driving, and once again, Volvo is leading this next stage. The Swedish company is one of the main partners on the EU’s Sartre project to establish road-train technology for long journeys.
Along with, say, five others headed in the same direction, your car could be electronically linked to a lead vehicle, which would take care of all the steering, braking and controls for you. You could literally, and safely, be able to sit back and read a book on long motorway journeys. Sounds far-fetched? Prototypes are already up and running.
So is control going to be removed entirely from drivers? No, at least not yet.
Legally, under the Vienna Convention, a driver is always responsible for their vehicle, whatever the electronics do, so all such systems can be overridden. Consider aircraft technology: an Airbus could take off, fly and land almost without any human intervention, yet airlines still pay hefty salaries to the person sitting in the cockpit.
Ford, in the US, for example, is launching Driving Skills For Life, a programme that will imbue teenage drivers with better habits and stronger skill sets.
For all our mechanical marvels, a better, safer driver will always have less need for them.
The future of in-car entertainment
Readers of a particular vintage will remember watching a young David Hasselhoff talking to his car in the television show Knight Rider, and the car, Kitt (below), talking back to him. Pure science fiction, of course. The thing about science fiction, though, is that it can be surprisingly prescient.
Today, we are on the cusp of a revolution in in-car information, telematics and entertainment that will totally change the way people interact with their cars, whatever seat they’re sitting in.
Already, wireless Bluetooth connections allow phones to be used safely while driving, as well as seamlessly streaming music collections to the car’s stereo. Ford (and not alone Ford) will soon cease production of CD autochangers, once the sine qua non of in-car tech, in favour of USB ports, Bluetooth and simple aux-in cable plugs.
The next hurdle will be getting internet in the car. It’s begun already, with companies such as BMW, Audi and Mercedes offering a Wi-Fi aerial for the inside of the car, making the cabin a Wi-Fi hotspot, connected to the internet through the same 3G and 4G technology used in smartphones.
“Bandwidth and cost are the two barriers to it,” says John Madden, a Dublin-based contributor to the technology magazine Wired.
“The providers, like O2 and Vodafone, would have to make a commitment from day one that they’re going to provide a system that can handle us all in our cars streaming videos and music. Make no mistake, if you’re an early adopter, you’ll pay for this system. But I think that the roll out of in-car and even personal streaming-media services and devices will bring the cost of high-speed data crashing down – eventually.”
Clever stuff, but it is merely the tip of the connectivity iceberg. Ford in the US is leading the way with its MyFord Touch system. For an optional cost of $1,500, Ford will fit your car with a 20cm colour touchscreen to control the stereo, trip computer and, if you’ve fitted it, satellite navigation.
Soon, it will offer text-to-voice systems to read out emails, Twitter messages and Facebook messages, while a conjoined speech-to-text system will users to reply, safely and legally, on the move.
Children will be able to stream films direct from the internet to their seat-back screens, while front passengers will be able to watch the latest TV news on a split-view screen, allowing the driver select different programmes on the same display (Jaguar and Mercedes already this technology).
The final frontier will be the virtual-reality windscreen; Autoglass already have a prototype. All sat-nav instructions, speed and engine information and your Twitter feed, right up there on the big screen where you can most easily see them.
Knight Rider? Forget it, that was so 1980s.
