New safety features from 2022 and 2024

Over by there

Claims on the new technology says it is better at this than the existing satnav stuff.
ESCAPE project launches positioning module for autonomous driving
Paragraph 5 (?) in there mentions urban canyon.

Not sure if that unit is involved in the roll out.

But I will believe it when I see it.

Bl4ckGryph0n

Oh gosh yes, terrible when you don’t want it. The one on the Prius we used to have was the worst. It not only kicked in hard, it also reduced power, and you couldn’t switch it off. We managed to get more movement into the car by getting out and push it.

Bl4ckGryph0n

There are several good projects. I was lucky enough to see the foam beacons in action. Seems to work very well and at very low cost.

What advocates of mobile phone Satnav often forget is that in car systems can be much more comprehensive. And contain more enrichment possibility from steering, speed pulse, gyroscope etc to improve position. Works much better in build up areas for example.

Over by there

I have had a few vehicles with built in sat nav and they are not going to win any prizes (except the van) but then they were hire clunkers or Merc Sprinters. The latter was particularly good and would get you around the big smoke pretty well, far better than my mobile app. I would expect a vehicle based system to be better but it seems that the lower end of the market do not get it.

I am going to guess that all that nice stuff you mention will take a while to trickle down?

Though with the roll out, I wonder what the base specification will be.

HMHB

The car based systems which look for speed signs.. do they scan overhead as well as to the side of the road? I'm wondering how this system will work on the 'smart' sections of motorways?

Like someone else has said, I can't see me buying new cars with this sort of system enforced. Looks like I'll need to get something brand new before this comes out and hope I snuff it before the car does

DPinBucks

Thanks for moving it.

DPinBucks

As I say above, my system (BMW) uses a camera, and scans a very wide field of view.  It certainly recognises overhead signs on motorways, and temporary limits on things like roadworks.  It's very sensitive, and easily picks up dirty or obscured signs, even in bad light or headlights.  The signs have to be in recognised standard format, so it ignores advisories which aren't circled in red.  It almost never makes a mistake.

Under the new proposals, the automatic system will be on by default, but you can turn it off.  On my current car, it's not automatic and it's off by default.  I do use it a lot.  Toggling it on and off is a simple button on the steering wheel, with a simple thumb switch to set the speed.  If the new system is similar, I'd have no issues with it.  In fact, so long as it's easy to turn off & on I'd prefer it.  Many places these days seem to change speed limits every few yards (but that's a whole different topic for ranting about).

DPinBucks

What makes you say that?  Do you have any evidence?

Road casualty figures in the UK and many other places are just about at their lowest since motor vehicles became popular.

A huge proportion of the credit for that is down to technology improvements.  Every innovation since getting rid of the man with the red flag has had detractors who said exactly the same thing.

If you can get hold of a copy, read Ralph Nader's Unsafe At Any Speed.  It raised a huge outcry from GM and others at the time, their slogan being "The only thing wrong with our cars is the nut behind the wheel".

I have a few of these innovations on my car; notably Adaptive Cruise Control and Head-up Display.  To my mind they are absolutely essential on any car I will ever buy in the future.   And as I say, I'm looking forward to the automatic speed limiter in my new one.  They don't take away the need for vigilance, but ACC in particular is there as a backstop if your attention wanders for a second (and who can say theirs never has?)  It's also much better at judging the speed of other cars than you are.  The extra relaxation it gives you on a long journey is very noticeable.  It's just as useful in stop-start traffic as on motorways; perhaps even more so.

If driver aids are a bad idea, then why are fighter aircraft bristling with them?

IronGiant

At a guess: you can disable it, but it will come back on next time you start the car.

gibbsy

Because they are highly trained and on the top of their game. Joe public not so. If everyone was on top of their game, keeping their brain on the not too easy job of driving, especially on a motorway then there would be no collisions. It's a simple job, you're only driving one way, yet there are so many collisions simply caused by driver error.

It is indeed the major failing of any vehicle is the nut behind the wheel, something I've always said. Make travelling too comfortable, too easy, too many functions on the car that takes away the driver's so very important input then that nut will fail all too easily because other things will distract them.

Take automatic braking, which my Golf has as standard, do I need to not pay attention to the road in front in a line of traffic. After all the car will brake and avoid a rear end shunt. But what if the road is wet or I am just that too close that even with automatic braking the laws of physics will still send me on a visit to the car in front boot space.

Unless everything is taken out of the hands of all drivers of all vehicles and the vehicles are controlled by a computer then even with the current proposals and the already fitted software now available there are still going to be collisions. Yet driverless cars have already started killing people.

The nut behind the wheel is always going to be the weakest link, taking away certain functions is not going to improve the performance of that so very important component.