[tsk1979]

The quality of today's cars is really appalling. Yesterday I was in a high end german car, and the blower was throwing out hot air. The AC was not working! And all due to a silly reason of not switching on the car AC!! When will the auto makers learn!

[groom]

These high technology safety equipments are still evolving,
Google's self driven cars has so far met with 6 accidents, people are now thinking how to make the self driven car safer. Are we going in circles ?

[jfxavier]

I use a Volvo car myself and it took me some time before I could get the hang of all the "limitations" of the various safety features that are detailed in the manual.
Below is an example of the "caution" messages posted in the page explaining Collision warning & Pedestrian detection with Auto Brake.

Driver error is very much possible especially if someone who is not familiar with the systems are trying out for the first time.

I guess more and more automation seems to be the way forward. No escaping that fact.
The next stage for Volvo is the "Drive Me" project.
They've had the "Drive Me" project underway for a few years now and in 2017 they will put 100 autonomous driving cars on the streets of Gothenburg "on sale" to general public.
All the cars that will be used in this project will use a production-viable autonomous driving system that has a multiple beam laser scanner, four surround radars, a trifocal camera, two long-range radars and twelve ultrasonic sensors. The system will also use a high-definition 3D digital map, GPS data and a windscreen mounted wave radar and camera that can read traffic signs as well as the road's curvature.

https://www.media.volvocars.com/glob...nable-mobility

[StarrySky]

Is the pedestrian detection in the Volvo a radar-based or camera-based feature? Volvo's with the higher-end safety features usually have a prominent black box-like structure mounted on the front grille. The XC60 in the video in the opening post does not seem to have it. I am inclined to believe Volvo's claim that this vehicle was not fitted with pedestrian detection system.

[jfxavier]

Originally Posted by StarrySky

Is the pedestrian detection in the Volvo a radar-based or camera-based feature? Volvo's with the higher-end safety features usually have a prominent black box-like structure mounted on the front grille. The XC60 in the video in the opening post does not seem to have it. I am inclined to believe Volvo's claim that this vehicle was not fitted with pedestrian detection system.

A few points WRT Volvo's "Collision Warning & Pedestrian Detection with Auto Brake" for the people who are interested in knowing how it works.
This system & "City Safety" system compliments each other.
Both the systems are designed to be overridden by driver inputs WRT steering, acceleration, braking etc. in a clear manner even if collision is unavoidable (maybe legal requirement and to cover for sensor error).

City Safety uses the Laser sensor on top of windscreen. Works day & night. But sensor has limitations like low hanging objects, tree branches, projecting loads, Accessories like bull bars & lamps projecting from bonnet height etc. triggering the system.
"City Safety" system is automatically enabled every time the engine is started. Can be manually deactivated by the settings menu, but will restart automatically at the next engine start.
The "City Safety" system works at 4-15 km speed difference to the vehicle in front to avoid collision. When speed difference is 15-30 kmph, the collision impact is reduced. 40% brake force applied max.

Collision Warning & Pedestrian Detection with Auto Brake system uses the camera on top of windscreen & the radar on the front grill. All limitations that is applicable to vision (eg. darkness, snow, rain, fog, excess backlight etc.) limits this system. High temp. in cabin turns off the sensors for 15 mins when the car is started to allow it to cool.
The system is designed to brake as late as possible to avoid unnecessary interference to driving. Full brake force is applied.
There are 3 parts to the "Collision Warning & Pedestrian Detection with Auto Brake"system
1. Collision warning, 2. Brake support, 3. Auto Brake.
The Brake support and Auto Brake functions are always enabled & cannot be disabled. Collision warning can be switched off using the settings menu or the button on the console. When the engine is restarted, the setting when the engine was switched off previously is retained and will not automatically switch on. The warning sound "only" can also be switched off by the menu, in which case only the HUD warning light will be shown. The warning distance can be set to "short, normal or long" by the settings menu.
The warning system is active between 4-50 kmph for pedestrians and up to 70kmph for vehicles.
Radar sensor is shared with Adaptive cruise control.
Camera sensor in the windscreen is shared with Lane departure warning & Driver alert system.

[nidheesh]

Originally Posted by W.A.G.7

Too much control handed over to the machines I say! While driving, I wouldn't want the car to be in control of my driving. With so much techno-gadgetry, I feel it takes the fun out of driving the car. I would rely on my own instincts rather than rely on that pedestrian safety system installed in the car.

Really agree with W.A.G.7. the terrible Indian traffic condition dominate much of the driver assist systems. I have even noticed this in Passat's auto park feature which refuses to park in tight parallel parkings, even when we can park in the same place manually.

[psispace]

Going by the situation on Indian roads, where every few meters, a couple of people come very near to bumping into you; activating this system in the car, and if it works correctly; could result in the car auto braking constantly! Try driving that car in a congested market area in India and they would have to do a lot of improvements to their own well designed systems!

I drive in such situations almost every day. The system will not intervene at crawling speeds. It will only warn me visually via a flashing red light at the bottom of the windscreen. It will give me audio warnings only if I haven't already put my foot on the brake.

The only irritating thing I have found driving through congested markets are the parking sensor sounds which I temporarily switch off till I am out of the mess.

Originally Posted by W.A.G.7

Too much control handed over to the machines I say! While driving, I wouldn't want the car to be in control of my driving. With so much techno-gadgetry, I feel it takes the fun out of driving the car. I would rely on my own instincts rather than rely on that pedestrian safety system installed in the car.

To each his own I guess.
For instance, I was totally against automatic cars not so long ago and never dreamt of buying one. When my father decided to purchase his Accord in 2001, I wanted a manual as it performs better than the sluggish auto. But my dad persisted, as its' primarily his car and he did most of the driving. I gradually learnt to work the gearbox and soon started to enjoy it.

After a while, I guess I got older. With the mad traffic these days, enjoying a manual tranny became a once in a while affair. After a hard day, crawling behind cars and bikes to get home became more of pain than any fun. Thats' when I started to gravitate towards automatics. My father was of course, very quick to sarcastically ask me what happened to your 'rpms' and 'torque curves'.

The point I am trying to make is, after sometime, we tend to accept certain changes.
ABS and traction control were non existent at one time. It took sometime for every experienced driver to suppress the urge to pump the brakes and bear that grinding feeling of the ABS under the right foot.
Very soon all cars will have ABS as standard. In Europe they are already mandatory and in the next phase of making Traction Control mandatory. The Indian Government is at presently studying the cost effectiveness of implementation of these systems.

I am not saying all safety systems will make into legislation in future. Some of these systems that we see in present day cars will be standard in future.

The fact is that these safety systems have significantly reduced survive-ability and morbidity following a trauma. Some have helped avoid them all together. In my profession, I see a lot of bad road traffic accident victims. Not all of them are bad or careless drivers. I always felt that a better equipped car may have saved them and their family.

[jfxavier]

The way the Volvo safety system is designed, it is not possible to switch off the auto brake function if it is available in the car.
Only audio & visual warning can be put off so that the driver is not distracted.
The pedestrian identification & auto brake if fitted will stop the car unless there is a technical malfunction or its limited due to ergonomic conditions.
The other situation is the system being overridden when there is clear input from driver to accelerate, steer or brake the car.
Looking at the video, it seems the car did not have the feature installed & probably the driver assumed it did or he lost control and accelerated instead of braking.

[acurafan]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

There is some evidence that adding safety features does lead to drivers taking some more risks. Be it settles, ABS, airbags etc.
Jeroen

Not sure whether that is universally true. I drive a car with a Driver Assistance system where I am the driver under test, so I have access to lot of data such as vehicle distance, time to collision, Pedestrian distance, Biker distance, Speed limit recognized values etc.
I think over few months, the system has made me a safer driver. For example the following distance which I used to think was safe at highway speed showed as 0.5 seconds collision distance, now I never follow a car unless it is atleast 0.8 second or 1 sec to collision. Similarly I always switch on the turn indicator to just mute the lane departure warning even when there isn't a car within 100-200m. One thing I always disregard is the speeding warning as no one really follows the highway speed limit unless there is a penalty associated with it. The pedestrian and biker detection actually works quite well and it has worked well even in darkness.

I also like the adaptive cruise control in both highway and stop go traffic where the car can follow the car ahead of it quite reliably. I am sure it will not work on Indian roads but for my commute it is invaluable.

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by acurafan

Not sure whether that is universally true..

What is definitely true is that you need to be very careful to extrapolate your own experience to be relevant for a larger group. To put it differently, none of what we do, experience, think, act tends to have statistical significance.

There are a lot of studies done in this area and they do point in the direction that adding safety features does mean drivers might take bigger risk, drive faster, brake later etc.

This is an interesting article about some of the fundamentals behind this behavior:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

[acurafan]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

There are a lot of studies done in this area and they do point in the direction that adding safety features does mean drivers might take bigger risk, drive faster, brake later etc.

Could you please point me to such studies? Just to be clear we are talking about Level 2 and Level 3 driving automation not ABS etc. The reason I am asking this is because rather than anecdotal evidence I work in this field and am familiar with lot of cognitive studies. In fact if you are interested, NHTSA quite recently published their finding. There is a reason Euro NCAP is including AEB(Automatic Emergency Braking) as part of their 5-star safety rating in 2018.

Trimble, T. E., Bishop, R., Morgan, J. F., & Blanco, M. (2014, July). Human factors evaluation of level 2 and level 3 automated driving concepts: Past research, state of automation technology, and emerging system concepts. (Report No. DOT HS 812 043). Washington, DC: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Chapter 3, page 37-50 can make some interesting reading. They specifically address the issue you are raising. Few examples for people who may not want to download 150 page document.

Davidse, Hagenzieker, van Wolffelaar, and Brouwer (2009) examined the extent to which driving performance of 10 older (70- to 88-year old) and younger (30- to 50-year old) drivers improved as a result of support by a driver assistance system. Findings indicated that the messages that informed drivers of right-of-way regulation, obstructed view of an intersection, and safe gaps to join or cross traffic streams resulted in safer driving performance. Additionally, one-way street message warnings resulted in fewer route errors. The results tended to be generally the same for all age groups.

Penna, van Passen, Abbink, and Mulder (2010) also presented findings associated with the use of a haptic interface during collision avoidance maneuvers. The researchers found that the haptic feedback effectively reduced the number of crashes and also decreased response time, control effort, and activity in the most critical situations.

The NHTSA-sponsored Road-Departure Crash Warning System (RDCW ) FOT (Wilson, Stearns, Koopmann, & Yang, 2007) set out to investigate if the RDCW – which warned drivers when they were either drifting out of their lane or about to enter a curve at an unsafe speed – could help reduce road- departure crashes. The FOT data indicated that with the RDCW activated a 10- to 60-percent reduction in departure conflict frequency was observed at speeds over 88 km/h (approximately 55 mi/h). Assuming 100-percent device availability and deployment, an annual reduction of 9,400 to 74,900 road-departure crashes was forecast.

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by acurafan

Could you please point me to such studies? Just to be clear we are talking about Level 2 and Level 3 driving automation not ABS etc.

No sorry, I am talking about the very basic safety features, ABS, seat belts, airbags etc. very interesting field you are in. Im sure those sort of safety features would make for safer driving by and large. At least one would hope so, as that is what they are supposed to do in the first place.
Jeroen

[amit]

Acura recalls 2 models over glitch in automatic emergency braking system.

In the recalled vehicles, the system can become confused and step on the brakes when it detects another vehicle accelerating in front while simultaneously driving along an iron fence or metal guardrail

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by amit

Acura recalls 2 models over glitch in automatic emergency braking system.

Interesting. As more and more of these safety features are being added we are likely to see more and more of these sort of recalls.

I wonder how the automative industry is dealing with the testing of these sorts of very software centric kind of features. The aviation industry, who have been doing this for several decades still get it wrong too, occasionally, but still.

Jeroen

[acurafan]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

Im sure those sort of safety features would make for safer driving by and large. At least one would hope so, as that is what they are supposed to do in the first place.
Jeroen

That is the hope, but someone proved me yesterday that all the safety features cannot save you from idiots. The person was distracted and rear-ended my car.

Originally Posted by Jeroen

I wonder how the automative industry is dealing with the testing of these sorts of very software centric kind of features.
Jeroen

Automotive industry has strict safety standards. The decision making engines are governed by ASIL-B safety rating which has significant redundancy. The decision makers (brake system, steering system etc) are governed by ASIL-D which takes multiple decision engines to control the car.

The problem lies typically in the sensors. In case of Acura the decisions were taken from readouts of medium range and long range RADAR. It is a known problem that RADAR signatures are ambiguous in the presence of metallic guardrails and other static metallic obstacles. That is why the current systems consider the decision from Vision sensors (HDR cameras that can see in Near IR) and at least one more sensors either RADAR or LIDAR to control the car. In Level-4 automation there are more redundancy check. For example the Google car uses a scanning LIDAR which costs close to $50-60K and other sensors. On top of it the car also needs route planning and needs a very high accuracy GPS which is not available for commercial use.

We are also looking at infrastructural sensors such as Vehicle to Vehicle short range communication as well as Vehicle to Infrastructural communication. That comes with whole host of other problems in terms of reliability, tamper proofing etc.