Vehicles that talk to each other to avoid collisions will be the next major advance in automotive safety as carmakers gear up to introduce ground-breaking new vehicle-to-vehicle technology.
The V2V-equipped cars are expected to be launched in Europe and the United States by 2015 - but GM Australia's vehicle regulation and certification manager, Mike Hammer, who oversees vehicle design regulations for domestic and export programmes and serves as industry-government liaison, has warned authorities of the need to establish the standards and governance framework required for its implementation.
Speaking at the second Intelligent Transport Systems summit on Australia’s Gold Coast Hammer, an electrical and computing systems engineer with 30 years' experience in the automotive industry, said V2V technology could be one of the single biggest automotive safety advances since the invention of the seatbelt and electronic stability control.
He said: “A friend of mine has this proximity warning device on his glider. We were up flying and it told us there was another glider flying below us; I thought it was a fantastic system that we ought to have on cars.
“There's a lot of research around the world now because, as our vehicles become safer, the role of human error in crashes is becoming more dominant - particularly things such as side impacts, which mostly occur below the speed limit and are usually the result of driver error.''
A field study by Melbourne's Monash University Accident Research Centre found that, of 25 participants driving a 21km urban route including 29 intersections, the drivers made an average of 12 errors per drive.
Hammer commented: “Half the errors occurred at intersections and there were actually four instances of people failing to stop at a red light even though they knew they were in a car that was being monitored.'
Similarly, a statistical study by the University of Adelaide's Centre for Automotive Safety Research concluded that 87 percent of crashes in South Australian urban areas were caused by people making simple road-user mistakes.
America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has estimated that co-operative intelligent transport systems could help in 81 percent of car and motorcycle crashes involving unimpaired drivers. And the Monash University team has forecast that intelligent vehicle safety technologies such as V2V could reduce serious road injuries by as much as 35 percent.
Hammer said: “These improvements are well beyond even the most ambitious government targets and what could be achieved with other technologies.
“There are similar studies overseas which have come to the same conclusion: that the vast majority of crashes are caused by people making mistakes - it's not bad behaviour. And a lot of our road-safety policies at the moment are focused on driver behaviour, rather than making the system more error-tolerant.”
Estimates on the contribution of human error to road-traffic crashes vary from 75 to 90 percent.
Human error is inevitable, but it should not result in death or serious injury. So really what we need is a second set of eyes, a guardian angel that intervenes if a crash is imminent.
Hammer predicted: “Vehicle safety development in the future will focus on actively assisting the driver not to make errors.''
He said active safety features such as anti-lock braking systems and electronic stability control could be viewed as the first error-tolerant technologies because they compensated for driver mistakes but, because they had been so effective, driver error was playing an increasingly large role in multi-vehicle collisions.
“The NHTSA stated recently that stability control was significantly reducing the number of off-road and rollover crashes in the US, so the automotive industry is now firmly focused on safety systems - and V2V is the lead technology within that, so the global vehicle manufacturers are getting together to agree on protocols and standards.
“We’ll probably start seeing vehicles with these new safety systems in the next five to 10 years.”
Essentially an all-round detection system, V2V makes vehicles aware of others close by; it’s immune to false alarms, fog and rain.
It’s one of the few technologies effective for prevention of side impacts and intersection collisions, and its low cost means that every vehicle can have it.
V2V technology was first seen in GM prototypes as early as 2004 and the same crash-avoidance technology is employed in a range of autonomous vehicle trials, which also use follow-the-leader radar-based cruise control, lane-departure warning and other technologies already available in many luxury cars, that could lead to cars that drive themselves within a decade.
Hammer said: “A lot of these technologies are available now, but you see them only on expensive vehicles. The beauty of V2V is it's very inexpensive - just a GPS receiver with no fancy radar.
“Because it's cheap, it can be used on all cars, and even cyclists can carry transponders.'' - The New Zealand Herald