December 11, 2008. Copyright 2008, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Smart safety systems offer hope for carmakers

LONDON, December 11, Graphic News: Despite slumping car demand in Europe and the United States, automakers predict rising demand in Brazil, Russia, India and China, driven by a growing trend for hybrid or all-electric vehicles and state-of-the art smart driver and road safety technologies.

Global car sales are expected to total 51.77 million next year -- less than six percent down on the 2007 all-time record of 54.92m units, Toronto-based Scotiabank reported last month in its Global Auto Report.

“In hard times innovation is crucial for the highly competitive auto industry and safety is an area where the major players are not skimping,” says Amnon Shashua, chairman of Mobileye Vision Technologies, developer of EyeQ, a digital vision system.

Based in Jerusalem and Amstelveen, Netherlands, Mobileye’s Advance Warning System is currently fitted to BMW 5 Series, GM Cadillac DTS and STS, Buick Lucerne, and Volvo’s S80, V70, XC70 and XC60 models. The latter features City Safety, a collision avoidance system that operates up to 30km/h (18.7mph) -- the speed at which three in four collisions take place.

First-generation technologies that help drivers to prevent accidents or lessen injuries and crash damage, so-called active safety systems, have appeared over the past three decades, and include antilock brakes (ABS), traction-control systems (TCS) and enhanced stability control, or ESC. Studies by Mercedes and Toyota indicate that ESC results in a 29 to 35 percent reduction in single-vehicle crashes and from 15 to 30 percent fewer head-on collisions.

New generation driver assistance systems (DAS) include Denso’s pre-crash safety system, which identifies obstacles a split second prior to collision, automatically tightens passenger seatbelts, and activates a pre-crash brake system. Japan-based Denso developed the system jointly with Toyota and introduced it in 2003.

In 2005 Britain’s Visiocorp introduced the “seeing” mirror for monitoring the blind spot and helping to make overtaking easier. Images taken 25 times a second by digital cameras in the door mirrors are analyzed by a microprocessor which can recognise a moving object up to 40 metres behind the car. If a vehicle enters a 10-metre warning zone, an orange LED lights up to warn the driver.

Systems still on the drawing board include automatic pedestrian recognition being developed by Mobileye, and pedestrian backover detection, being developed by Ford’s Research and Innovation Centre in Dearborn, Michigan. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that nearly 200 deaths and about 7,000 injuries occur in backover crashes -- where the car hits a person or an obstacle behind the vehicle -- each year.

The European Union’s programme for road safety aims to halve the 40,000 annual road fatalities by 2010, and DAS is seen as a major contributor to this aim.

With the cost to automakers of a built-in system running at around $200, Mobileye’s Shashua believes the next four years will be growth years for smart auto technology. As the algorithms for image processing are continuously evolving active safety systems will eventually work together to form a true safety bubble around a vehicle.

“The big jump in revenues will come in 2012, when all car manufacturers will be offering crash detection technology as a standard feature in all models in order to keep up with the competition,” predicts Shashua.
/ENDS