Between seemingly endless traffic jams and widely swinging weather patterns, not to mention plain old bad driving, you don’t have to look far for reasons why car crashes are a leading cause of accidental death. You also don’t have to look far for examples of automakers focusing on a new generation of systems aimed at eliminating ALL accidents.

According to a report from the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 43,200 died on the nation’s highways in 2005, up from 42,636 in 2004.

With years of innovation in passive vehicle safety — such as airbags, safety cages and crumple zones that protect passengers as a crash takes place — automakers and government regulators are talking about a vision of collision avoidance. Manufacturers have begun looking at ways to make accidents a thing of the past, espousing the idea of zero accidents. You read that right: zero accidents!

Indeed, prevention is the new industry hot button across the globe — in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Systems that advise drivers of potential problems or assist them in avoiding collisions, of course, are helpful. And, in fact, some have already been deployed.

In the bigger picture, automotive vendors are spinning the possibility of a “safety cocoon” aboard the vehicle, “replete with radar, laser, vision systems and ultrasonic sensors,” as Design News pointed out in its cover story this month. In essence, the idea is to enable vehicles to “see” their surroundings, provide warnings to drivers and, in extreme emergencies, even commandeer the brakes and steering.

Infiniti’s Lane Departure Warning System keeps vehicles from straying dangerously into the path of other vehicles, a common cause of crashes, BusinessWeek recently noted in an interesting editorial entitled “Today’s High-Tech Cars”:

A tiny camera mounted on the rear-view mirror reads the road ahead and, with the assistance of an onboard computer, sets of blinking lights and alarm to warn drowsy drivers they may be faltering.

Volvo’s Blindspot Information System (BLIS) system uses a camera in the outer mirrors to detect other vehicles entering blind spots and then alerts drivers via a small blinking light that it isn’t safe to change lanes.

BMW’s night vision system uses a thermal imaging camera to detect human beings, animals and inanimate objects out of the driver’s range of vision or the headlights’ reach. Then images are beamed to the dash-mounted display, heat readings showing up in bright hues. The use of advanced infrared technology lets BMW’s system read the road about 1,000 feet in front of the car without interference from oncoming cars’ headlights, according to an announcement from the automaker (via AutoBlog).

Credit: AutoBlog

However, true imaging-actuated collision avoidance systems are at least a decade away, Portable Design has reported, but that time span has mostly to do with: 1) the long design cycles of automobile safety systems; 2) developing a system that is just shy of 100 percent reliable; and 3) human psychology — how people deal with losing control.

Much of the base technology is ready. Image reception technology such as in digital still cameras and programmable digital-signal-processor (DSP) chips that turn raw images into actionable information, for example, has reached price/performance targets that put automotive vision on the verge of practicality. The engineering challenges have more to do with product definition, system integration, and manufacturing a smart-vehicle infrastructure.

Brake assist, for example, is a natural precursor to — and critical part of — any artificial vision-based collision avoidance system.

One of the most promising emerging brake-related technologies is electronic brakes, which would replace brake fluid with “lighter, quicker wires and motors,” according to Popular Science.

The long-standing obstacle has been that industry-standard 12-volt electrical systems cannot drive a motor powerful enough to stop, say, a two-ton sedan. However, with the Electronic Wedge Brake (EWB), which German company Siemens VDO unveiled at last fall’s Frankfurt auto show, it is now possible to realize a 12V brake-by-wire system, according to Automotive DesignLine.

Essentially, Siemens solves the problem by tapping the vehicle’s own energy to slow itself down.

Simply put (VERY simply put), electric motors drive screwjacks that move a corrugated outer plate fore and aft in plane with the motor. Several small rollers are trapped between that surface and an opposing corrugated plate. When the outer plate moves, it wedges the rollers between ridges in the opposing surfaces, driving the inner plate and brake pad into the rotor. The spinning rotor pulls the pad in its direction until the rollers are so tightly sandwiched that they stop the wheel.

Said Automotive DesignLine:

The wedge effect is amplified automatically as the result of the wheel’s rotation allowing varying degrees of braking force to be generated with little effort. The intelligently controlled wedge converts the kinetic energy of the vehicle directly into braking energy. As a result of its self-reinforcing action, the EWB is faster than today’s hydraulic brake and requires only one-tenth the energy to operate.

“Compared to the traditional hydraulic brake, the modern ‘wedge’ brake design offers substantial advantages in areas such as safety and comfort,” the publication said. The EWB design eliminates components such as hydraulic lines, brake cylinders, brake booster, or ABS control unit, to offer overall system weight reduction — with simplified service, greater reliability, and increased safety. By doing away with the entire hydraulic system, the overall brake system can be more economically integrated into the automobile.

Yet the key to a crash-free future is vehicle-to-vehicle communication, or V2V, Popular Science said in the summer. Some advances that would make V2V possible are already on the way:

Increasingly sophisticated GPS will soon allow you to pinpoint your vehicle’s precise location at any given moment, and stability-control systems that track your car’s speed and direction are even now feeding such information to onboard computers. The primary remaining challenge is finding the means to communicate that data to cars in your projected path.

Volkswagen’s Electronics Research Laboratory recently fitted two Jettas and two Audi A3s with DSRC units and used V2V to run them, platoon-style, through San Francisco successfully.

General Motors has demonstrated a DSRC-equipped Cadillac CTS that stops itself to avoid accidents. Its enhanced stability-control system predicts where it’s headed and prompts the onboard computer to apply the brakes without any input from the driver.

An engineering team at Honda R&D is working on a human-machine interface that will keep drivers in the loop. In addition to head-up displays, Honda is also developing what’s called haptic feedback, such as shaking steering wheels and pedals that vibrate.

Tier-one suppliers are working on reducing fatalities by placing intelligence on-board the vehicle, enabling vehicles to “see” in all directions, and make informed decisions about their situations. Suppliers and automakers, working together, have laid the groundwork for a progressive plan that begins with adaptive cruise control, then moves to autonomous lane keeping, and graduates to collision avoidance. All of the technologies require use of advanced sensors.

For automakers, the challenge inherent in such systems is the fusion of massive amounts of data from a number of high-tech sources. So engineers face a computing dilemma, not only because of a huge amount of sensor data, but because of its complexity. To make sense of it all, automakers want to combine the sensor inputs to form a software model that creates a “holistic” picture of the outside environment, which is important, experts say, because if vehicles can ever be expected to steer themselves out of potential crashes, they must first know everything that’s around them, Design News reported.

That way, they don’t steer out of one crash and into another one.

Resources

Transportation Secretary Mineta Calls Highway Fatalities National Tragedy, Says All Americans Can Do More to Improve Road Safety
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, April 20, 2006

Eliminating Automobile Accidents with Smart Technology
by Charles J. Murray
Design News, Oct. 9, 2006

Today’s High-Tech Cars
by Matt Vella
BusinessWeek, Oct. 2, 2006

BMW Night Vision to become available in March
by Erin Mays
AutoBlog, Jan. 25, 2006

Automobile collision avoidance: Building from the airbag up
by Matthias Poppel
Portable Design, February, 2006

Frost: Innovative Products Help Suppliers in Competitive Original Equipment Brake Systems Market
IHS Automotive News, Oct. 9, 2006

Coming Soon: Electronic Brakes
by Stephan Wilkinson
Popular Science, January 2006

Wedge brake design boosts by-wire stopping performance
by Bernd Gombert
Automotive DesignLine, April 6, 2006