8th December 2006

This is the future, and it's sneaking into cars today
A high tide of new technology is about to transform the motoring world.

Car manufacturers have been promising a revolution in car design since the 1950s when General Motors showed
concept cars shaped like fighter jets and powered by gas turbines. In the early 1990s the hope was that electric cars
would end dependence on oil.

There was even a California State target for 10% of all cars to be electric by 2003.

The truth is, there has been no revolution in cars, just evolution. But new developments are coming thicker and faster
than before, largely thanks to advances in electronics. New fuels will be the biggest breakthrough in the next decade,
but before then there are a multitude of innovations designed to make drivers’ lives easier or at least curb the stress
of increasing traffic. In the long run, many of them are likely to empty your wallet.

ACTIVE NOISE
First developed as a prototype in the 1980s, this deals with road and wind noise by sending an opposite phase signal
through the audio system. The idea is that the active noise cancels out or reduces the unwanted sound.

CAR-TO-CAR NETWORKING
This is technology that allows cars to “talk” to each other, developed by BMW and DaimlerChrysler.
The system passes on information about congestion, bad weather or an accident to cars in the vicinity, giving drivers
time to prepare.
The clever part is that the messages have to travel only short distances, because each car acts as a relay station.

STEERING ASSIST
Steering assist determines the optimal steering lock when an emergency manoeuvre is detected.
If the steering by the driver does not match, power assistance is increased or decreased.

ADAPTIVE CRUISE CONTROL
The big problem with cruise control on congested roads is constantly having to brake and reset it as traffic ebbs
and flows. The system is now only for use at cruising speed, but Bosch, the giant electronics supplier, has announced
a version for 2007 that will operate in town and stop the car in traffic.

ADVANCED DRIVER ASSIST
This is the most revolutionary advance of the lot. It takes elements of current technology
and combines them to create a car that partly steers itself. The first element is adaptive cruise control, so the car
“knows” what is ahead. The second is a lane departure warning system. It uses a camera to scan the road ahead and
determine where and by how much the road curves. It then instructs the electronic power steering to move accordingly.
The clever bit is that it does not provide all the steering effort required. It moves the car 80% of the required distance,
but relies on the driver manually adding the other 20% — so the driver cannot simply ignore the road ahead.

In addition the system detects whether the driver’s hands are off the wheel and emits a warning beep (as it does even
if the drivers hands are just resting on the wheel). If the driver remains passive, the system shuts down.
The system will be restricted to autoroutes because it can only cope with gentle curves and needs two sets of white lines
to get its bearings.

NIGHT VISION
This is already offered on the Mercedes S-class and newly available on BMW’s 7-series. It uses infrared thermal
imaging to project an image onto the satellite navigation screen showing people, animals or crashed cars up to 300 yards away.
That is roughly double the distance of headlights and, because it works on heat rather than light, it can “see” through fog.

DIRECTIONAL HEADLIGHTS
Not a new idea but now a commercially viable one. Citroën had swivelling headlights in the 1970s on the DS and SM models,
but the system was expensive. Top-end cars such as the Porsche Cayenne Turbo and Mercedes CLS 55 AMG have directional
headlights as standard and they will trickle down to the mainstream over the next few years.

ELECTRONIC HANDBRAKES
Conventional handbrakes are being replaced by electronic buttons that release the brakes.

SATELLITE NAVIGATION AND AUDIO
If you are worried about button overload (and the new Mercedes S-class has more than 100 buttons to play with),
cars will soon have functions operated by voice command, though not the ones that could affect road safety.

SELF-PARKING
This measures available spaces, finds a suitable one and operates the steering without human intervention.
It is now available on the Lexus LS460

All this technology may seem less exciting than the promises of jet cars of the 1950s.
But those creations were there to disguise the fact that US car engineering was virtually stagnant.
Today we have lots of incremental improvements that are combining to create radical progress.

BUT - and it's a huge but......................

People used to know their place in the world: centred between the striped and solid pavement markings, 2 seconds of drive-time
behind the car in front, and when parking, not jammed against the bumper of the car parallel-parked behind them.
Today, sensors, cameras, and microprocessors let the driver – correction: the well-heeled driver – keep his car properly positioned,
even when he's not fully alert.

Just a word of warning: The cocoon of technology is not a silent partner. Warning beeps remind passengers, as well as you,
of driving faux pas. (That's on top of the beeps emanating from your cell phone, BlackBerry, radar detector, and so on.)
Here are three such technologies : active cruise control, lane departure warning, and backup sonar and camera.
All help.
But most beep.

Active (or Whatever) Cruise Control (ACC)

Most of today's cars have cruise control. Set it to 75 on the highway, and you can cruise effortlessly – until you come upon some dolt
doing 55 in the left lane. (Q: On superhighways, what do North American and British drivers have in common? A: Both drive to the left.)
Enter active cruise control (also called adaptive, automatic, or intelligent cruise control). Radar or laser sensors look for traffic in the
lane in front of you, slow you to a safe following distance, apply the brakes if necessary, and then bring you back up to speed once
the obstacle has changed lanes. Most ACC systems can bring you down to 20 miles per hour; then there's a warning beep, indicating,
"You're on your own, lad." More than a dozen automakers offer ACC; the cost ranges from $600 to $3,000.
(If you want fully automatic stopping, that's coming in 2007. Long- and short-range radar sensors, sometimes aided by a camera,
see that you're about to nail a car or a pedestrian and apply just-in-time braking force. Some do it only when you're on the brakes;
others will start without you.)

An icon in the dash lights up to indicate you're in range of another car and have radar lock.
Most of the time, ACC works wonderfully if you close too quickly, or the car ahead slows, or another driver cuts in front of you
(as punishment for leaving a safe following distance). When the distance gets too close for the black box' comfort, your car backs
off the throttle and then applies the brakes. You get to set the spacing to roughly one, two, or three seconds of following distance.

But ACC doesn't deal well with dense traffic for instance, when returning to town at the end of a holiday, when traffic the last
100 miles can vary from 65 kmh to a crawl and then back up again. ACC handles deceleration well most of the time and
re-acceleration sometimes.  When traffic flow drops below 20 mph, you have to accelerate past 30 mph and re-engage ACC.
Work, work, work. At the closest distance, aggressive drivers still have room to cut in front.
And ACC doesn't function at speeds above 90 mph, in part because the radar sees ahead a couple hundred yards, not a half mile,
and you might close too quickly. Something to remember on the Autobahn.
ACC is fairly polite: It doesn't complain about your driving in front of the passengers, deceleration is gentle, and the only beeps are
when it cuts out.

Lane departure warning.
Any fool with $50,000-plus to spend can find a car with ACC. But lane departure warning (LDW) has found a home in just a handful
of vehicles so far. A forward-facing camera tucked in with the center rearview mirror watches for pavement markings on the road
ahead and beeps if you veer onto or near the markings, unless your turn signal is on.

It's hard to drive for more than 5 minutes (okay, 2 minutes) without hearing a warning beep — which passengers also can hear.
It's embarrassing. One car has loudspeakers to spare, 14 all told, and every one of them beeps! On longer trips, LDW sounded off more frequently, confirming that you're less alert later in the day.
    
But: LDW didn't work during a snowstorm, and it had some trouble in heavy rain and before the windshield fully defrosted.

Backup Camera, Backup Sonar

Completing the cocoon are backup sonar and backup cameras. Sensors in the back bumper (sometimes in front, too) start to beep
as you approach an object and become more insistent as the hazard gets nearer. At $250 to $500, backup sonar belongs on mostly
every car; the cost is probably lower than the cost of the deductible for just one careless backing accident.

If your car has an LCD panel in the dash, you can get a trunk-mounted wide-angle backup camera that displays when you're in reverse.
All devices show an impressively sharp color image, even at night; some overlay a rectangle indicating the car's width; and a few have
a second rectangle that turns with the steering wheel to project where you're headed. The cost of the camera isn't that high, especially
compared with (typically) four sonar sensors and wiring embedded in the bumper. Having used parking sonar for years, I thought the
camera might be a gimmick. Turns out it ties sonar for backing safety and is vastly better for backing out of narrow driveways at night.

Both these technologies can be added to existing cars for $100 (bare camera, you install it) to $500, but a backup camera makes
the most sense if you've got an in-dash display.

The cocoon becomes more enveloping and protective in 2007, with blind spot detection. Think of these devices as intelligent
rear-view mirrors. Cameras, radar, or possibly sonar watch the lanes alongside and behind your car. If you start to switch lanes into
space that's already occupied, you're warned by yet another series of beeps, and possibly a shudder in the steering wheel or a red
warning in the outside rearview mirrors. This could be a boon for older drivers who have trouble turning sideways to look.
It would also allow for smaller, more aerodynamic rearview mirrors, not that most aren't too small already.

But: All this technology has downsides. It hikes the price of the car by as much as $5,000. It escalates repair costs for the
embedded sonar/radar/video sensors. Video and radar sensors don't work in snow or rain (although the rear cameras stay
pretty clean), and even if they did, cameras couldn't see the pavement markings under snow.

If you don't have this technology in every car you drive, you may think you've got the cocoon when you don't.
That's especially true with backup sonar, which is silent until you approach an object.
Silence in a sonar-equipped car is good.
Silence when backing up in your other, non-sonar car could be bad.
That's another advantage of the backup camera over parking sonar: You'll know when you don't have it.

There are only so many ways in which a car can beep.

And you may need a minute to decide if a beep is your lane warning, radar detector, or cell phone in pager mode.

Or possibly, it's only an echo from your microwave.