See the light

Citroën was the first carmaker to offer a lane departure warning system in the UK, with its large and largely unloved C5 saloon. Citroën’s system uses downward-looking infrared sensors mounted just behind the front bumper.
The sensors detect lines painted on the road, and if the vehicle strays across a line without the driver flicking an indicator, the driver is duly alerted to the fact. In the Citroën’s case, the reprimand comes in the shape of a tingling in the bottom, as either a left or right buttock is jiggled using one of a pair of vibrators mounted in the seat base. Which may, in fact, encourage a certain category of driver to weave all over the road.
French component supplier Valeo and US-based firm Iteris have clubbed together on a different and less intimate lane departure detection system, dubbed LaneVue by Valeo and AutoVue by Iteris.
Vibrator fetishists will be disappointed to learn that it uses the car stereo to warn the driver if the car strays out of its lane without indicators being used. The left or right speaker issues a rumble-strip noise to warn the driver that the line has been crossed.
To detect where the lines are, the Valeo/Iteris system uses a forward-looking optical sensor mounted high-up in the windscreen. The same sensor can be used to trigger rain-sensitive wipers or automatic headlights.
The optical sensor scans the road ahead and performs continuous image analysis to work out where the painted lines are several car lengths ahead. It can then work out where the lines pass under the car.
Also on Valeo’s books is one of the current crop of gizmos designed to swivel headlights as the car corners, to better illuminate the road ahead.
Obviously not a new trick – Citroën’s DS had mechanical swivelling headlamps in 1955 – the current generation is nonetheless rather clever. Valeo's unit gobbles up data about steering angle and road speed and instantly works out where best to point the lamps, in dipped or main beam mode, up to 15 degrees from the straight ahead.
There’s clearly some room to amalgamate these two lines of technology; of lane detection and headlight aiming.
The obvious drawback to the current headlight swivelling system is that it gets its situation analysis from the steering. It intrinsically assumes, therefore, that you want to see around a corner you’re already in. Great for long, smooth, constant-radius corners of the kind found in car brochures and almost nowhere else.
In the real world, there are S-bends. And there are corners that get sharper when you least expect it.
What the keen driver really wants are headlights that shine round corners just before you turn into the bend, so that you can see where you're going before you get there. What we want is for the headlight-aiming-pixie in the black box to look at the lines ahead and know where the road is about to go, just like the driver does.
That, presumably, is what Valeo is working on right now. If not, it ought to start.

Root cause of car-phone risks

According to research highlighted by New Scientist, it is the poor sound quality of a telephone conversation that makes talking on a mobile while driving so dangerous.
Earlier this month research carried out in Australia suggested that drivers are four times more likely to be involved in a crash if they are talking on the phone “regardless of sex, age group, or whether or not a hands-free device was used”.
Now research by boffins in Japan suggests that distortions introduced into a cell-phone conversation by a car’s movement mean the brain has to devote extra attention to working out what was said. A phone call in a moving vehicle works the brain harder than a normal conversation.
The researchers suggest that this is why a phone call is more distracting than chatting to a passenger in the car. “Previously, it was assumed that speaking to passengers was less distracting because they stop talking when the driver needs to concentrate,” New Scientist says, which was always a muddle-headed argument. Auto IT’s experience has shown that spouses very often elect to bring up taxing discussions about life, love, or politics while Auto IT is attempting to filter onto a busy motorway.
Anyway, the findings suggest a way forward, and also problems ahead.
Improving the sound quality of mobile phones may make them less distracting, and therefore safer.
However, one of the root causes of distortion is the phone’s need to switch communications between different base stations as the car moves into and out of range of the fixed transmitters. The latest 3G mobile phones will need to switch more often for a given road speed, as 3G cells are smaller than existing GSM cells.
There’s a dilemma, therefore. The 3G system offers the data rates that will be needed to do the audio processing to compensate for the distortion problems, but 3G will also worsen the problems that need to be fixed.

Extra tech to fix short-sighted C-charge

Apparently London’s wondrous congestion charging initiative, as well as failing to raise the expected revenues, suffers from inadequate technology. According to a report published by UK trade rag Computing, the computerised cameras posted in a ring around the charging zone are able to read only 70 percent of the number plates on cars whizzing - or more often crawling - on their expensive way to wherever they are going.
The solution? More complexity. A trial already under way in the London Borough of Southwark will see cars fitted with the Q-Free tagging system already used to charge for toll roads in a number of countries.
Q-Free relies on passive wireless tags and a system of active roadside scanners. Tags are normally glued to the windscreen behind the rear-view mirror. Being useful only for regular commuters, the Q-Free tags will supplement rather than replace the existing system, meaning more expense and - it would seem - even less money for improving public transport.
It’s enough to make you want to buy an electric Noddy-car.

Get your motor running

Interesting fact: direct-injection, four-stroke petrol engines of the kind used by Audi could dispense with the starter motor, meaning an end to being stranded by a flat battery. The petrol in such engines is delivered directly into the cylinder and ignited by a spark, so the engine could be fired from cold by a quick squirt-n-spark in any cylinder that happens to have stopped in what would have been the power stroke, if it were running. Obviously it’s a bit more technical than that, but the approach is apparently perfectly possible. Clearly it could dramatically cut fuel consumption in city vehicles, by allowing efficient and instant stop-start use of the engine. Could this swing the efficiency pendulum away from diesel and back to petrol? The diesel engine’s compression ignition nature means it doesn’t lend itself to the technique.

New Passat to stop smartly

Some versions of the upcoming new VW Passat Estate, due to arrive in the UK in November, will be offered with radar distance control that is integrated with an emergency braking assistant.
As well as governing speed in cruise-control mode, the radar monitors the road up to 200 metres ahead, at speeds of up to 130mph. It does so even when the cruise control is switched off. If it senses that an impact is imminent, the system reacts ahead of the driver and pre-pressurises the braking system, setting the brake pads against the discs in microseconds, so that they are poised to offer instant response to the driver’s somewhat slower-moving foot. The system also lowers the threshold at which the brake maximising feature cuts in. This subsystem applies maximum stopping power during an emergency stop, rather than braking in proportion to pedal pressure.
All the underlying cleverness was developed by Bosch, which has a three-stage plan for its predictive safety system (PSS) initiative. The current VW offering is just the first stage, which Bosch calls Predictive Brake Assist (PBA). The second stage is called Predictive Collision Warning (PCW), designed to alert drivers to danger with a short burst of braking, a tug from the driver’s seat-belt pre-tensioner, and warning lights and sounds. Presumably a boxing glove will emerge on a spring from the steering wheel if the driver still fails to react after all the above fanfare.
The next step is to have a system that executes an emergency stop even if the driver does sit there like a crash-test dummy. This is called Predictive Emergency Brake (PEB), and looks to be several years away from production at present. Bosch says it will require an automated visual analysis of the situation, as well as radar.
PEB could help a lot: many accidents occur when drivers are not looking at the road ahead, distracted by something inside the vehicle or looking sideways on the approach to a junction or roundabout. As Bosch notes, “A study by the Association of German Insurers shows that almost half of all drivers involved in accidents did not brake at all.”
No doubt the step beyond these three, which Bosch is not yet talking about, will involve taking control of the steering and attempting to swerve around an object that cannot be avoided by braking alone.
Teething troubles with such a system could prove messy, so while it will no doubt be tried in the near-term on the test track, automatic evasive manoeuvring may take years to arrive on the roads for real.

Bluetooth compatibility issues

An interesting update to an earlier post (Bluetooth bites Altea owner, 18 July) can be found in IT Week’s letters blog. According to Crown Mobile Communications, quite a few Bluetooth-capable smartphones and PDAs are set up so that they cannot be made to work with in-car Bluetooth systems - the kind that meld an external phone with in-car systems such as buttons on the wheel and integrated dashboard displays.

The problem is that the I-Mate’s manufacturer, HTC – which also makes O2’s XDA and similar handsets for other networks – has only enabled its Bluetooth software to work with a headset. It will never work with any car kit.

The only conceivable reason for crippling a phone's Bluetooth subsystem in this way would be to minimise the security risks of snooping attacks. Even if this is the reason, it seems a little short-sighted on the part of HTC.

Bigger role for Bluetooth

UK-based automotive consulting firm SBD has released a (paid for) report predicting that increasing numbers of cars will be sold with the option of Bluetooth hands-free systems, designed to link to the driver’s mobile phone. Hopefully with a little more user-friendliness than the current system installed in some Seats. It also notes that automotive Bluetooth could be given a more versatile role, perhaps by linking to music players or to navigation systems - TomTom already supplies a Bluetooth GPS unit designed to link to Bluetooth-equipped PDAs, so the potential for upgrading a Bluetooth equipped car after it leaves the showroom is clear.
SBD's main conclusion seems to be that, as Bluetooth phones become the norm, so too will Bluetooth-equipped cars.

The development of Bluetooth has already had an impact on the provision of embedded car telephones, with some manufacturers deleting them as options

Fuel-cell A-Class tested

San Jose Mercury News reporter Matt Nauman drove a Mercedes A-Class-based fuel-cell vehicle for five days, and has put his driving diary online. He clocked up just 133 miles in the F-Cell and seems to have spent most of the time with one eye on the digital hydrogen gauge. Refuelling - in a bus depot and not a fair indication of how a normal fuel-stop might work - sounds ever so slightly intimidating:

First, a technician swept the car with a hydrogen sniffer to make sure it wasn't leaking. Then, he and Phelps [a DaimlerChrysler technician] donned flame-resistant smocks and safety glasses. They grounded the car, asked everyone nearby to turn off their cell phones and stand 20 or so feet away. Signs prohibited smoking and warned of hydrogen's flammability.

Oddly, there was no sign of the fire brigade on standby in Honda's handover of its FCX fuel-cell car to an unfeasibly shiny family. Presumably the guys in asbestos suits were just out of shot.

C6 keeps eyes on the road

The upcoming Citroën C6 is to join the very small band of cars that offer a head-up display (HUD), in addition to Citroën’s lane departure system and other clever stuff like an electronic handbrake. The company said the new display unit will project essential information - including speed and navigation indications - onto the windscreen.
This is exactly the right place to put navigation data - the centre console is a potentially dangerous place to put information that has a very high likelihood of drawing the driver’s attention away from the road ahead, particularly when driving in city traffic.
Other cars offering HUDs include the BMW 5-Series and 6-Series, and the Chevrolet Corvette. You can also find one inside an F1 driver’s helmet, apparently.

Honda plots fuel-cell future

Honda chief Takeo Fukui talked to investors today and outlined future plans, including an increased focus on hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. The firm has already begun leasing its FCX fuel-cell vehicle to non-fleet customers in the US - to creepily perfect-looking nuclear families, at least - and now hopes to begin leasing a fuel-cell motorcycle by 2009.

Road pricing, ID cards and Big Brother

Plenty of observers have suggested that Alistair Darling’s proposed road-pricing initiative will raise revenues in two ways. Firstly, there will be the straightforward charges imposed for simply crawling along in rush-hour traffic, popping out to the shops, or taking an injured rabbit to the vet. The rights and wrongs of such charges have been widely debated.
The second, and more pernicious means of raising revenue, will be to impose fines on speeding motorists. Darling’s plan calls for GPS units to be fitted to cars, capable of detecting where the car is and when, so that usage of the road between rabbit hutch and vet’s surgery can be measured, costed, and charged. The running tally of where the car is and when will also provide data about speed - sufficient to tell if the bunny-saving mercy-mission was taken at an amble or a sprint. It’s little surprise that the prospect of round-the-clock speed surveillance has gone down like a plutonium poo among motoring enthusiasts.
But worse could be on the way.
There is the distinct possibility of a connection between Darling’s Draconian proposals and that other great liberty-lynching plan of the day: identity cards.
Darling’s scheme is still indistinct, but ID cards are a firmer plan, based around smartcards capable of being quizzed by a computer to verify identity.
It seems very likely that if and when road-pricing black boxes are mandated for all UK vehicles, the little beggars will have a slot in the front for your ID card. Fail to prove who you are, and the car won’t start.
This scenario will have a host of practical benefits. It will make it clear who should pay the road pricing bill. It will make it unambiguous who needs to be fined and have points put on their licence when illegal speeding is detected. It will cut car theft, help the authorities track suspects, and prevent disqualified drivers from breaking their ban.
There will, of course, be a slight loss of privacy. A minor erosion of the basic human right to freedom of movement.
Nothing to worry about there, then...

Hybrids not Hummers

Lee Iacocca, 80-year-old Detroit car guy, is not too old to see that there is a substitute for cubes.
A story in the New York Times quotes the ex Chrysler chairman as saying that General Motors has wasted its money on Hummers and should have built hybrids instead - even half-baked hybrids:

If it delivers on half the promise, do it. Because you can't let Toyota rule the roost here continually. I don't see anything on the horizon short term that can improve fuel economy any faster than a hybrid.

Top Gear on top gear

Top Gear magazine redesigned its web site yesterday. Included in the line-up is a nice piece from Jeremy Clarkson on the joys of in-car iPods.

You see, it's no good just having a radio, because radio stations have a nasty habit of playing songs I don't like.

Bluetooth bites Altea owner

Kelvyn Taylor, a columnist for both business rag IT Week and consumer mag PCW, predicts increasing problems as more auto makers put Bluetooth capability into their cars and promise buyers that they will be able to make calls by prodding the buttons on their steering wheels. He tells a tale of woe involving a Seat Altea, a Bluetooth phone, and a very disgruntled customer:

I think anyone who's used Bluetooth can guess what happens next. His handset, an I-Mate Jam smartphone, refuses to connect to the system. Further investigation revealed that Seat has a list of a couple of dozen compatible phones, and of course this doesn't list the [I-Mate]. In fact only eight of the listed models offer full functionality - the rest only offer audio functions.
What's even worse is that he can't even use a separate Bluetooth headset because every time he gets in the car the phone tries fruitlessly to negotiate a connection with the in-car system.

As Taylor goes on to speculate, it makes you wonder what would happen if, stuck in traffic in your Seat Altea, you happened to find yourself next to someone who does have a compatible phone...
Buyers would be well advised to pore over the small print when sizing up Bluetooth compatible cars. And be prepared to buy a new phone.

Hybrid power for 2006 Civic

Honda has confirmed that UK versions of the upcoming new Civic hatchback will be offered with an updated IMA hybrid powerplant. Unlike the current dowdy Civic IMA, next year’s British-built Civic hybrid will have the looks to match its state of the art underpinnings. In action, the new Honda will also work a little more like Toyota’s hybrids - allowing the VTEC engine to switch off entirely during low-speed, stop-start motoring, or during braking. The compressor for the air conditioning system can also run off either the engine or the electric motor.
While Toyota’s Prius has been a runaway success in the US, it’s still a rarity on UK roads. Its size - and contentious styling - count against it. Hybrids offer the biggest savings when stuck in congested city traffic, but most cars bought by Londoners, for example, are a lot smaller than the Prius. The Civic could be the car to break through the popularity barrier in the UK, bringing hybrids into the mainstream.

Sharp screen gives double vision

Japanese giant Sharp has shown off a clever new LCD panel developed at its European laboratories, which can show two images simultaneously. Rather than a mixed-up blurry mess, the system allows two people sitting at different angles to see two clearly distinct pictures.
The screen will be ideal for mounting on car centre consoles, as the double-image capability will let a passenger watch a movie, say, while the driver sees only the in-car navigation system.

Microsoft updates car Windows

Microsoft launched its latest software for carmakers, Windows Automotive 5.0, earlier this week in Japan. Company vice president Todd Warren talked up the depth and breadth of Microsoft’s technology, although it’s not entirely clear what use the handwriting recognition he highlighted would be in a car. Voice recognition, also given prominence, does have more obvious benefits, however.
Warren also stated several times that it’s now eight years since Microsoft’s first foray into auto IT, although the Citroën Xsara Windows CE of five years ago is the oldest example of a real production vehicle with Microsoft behind the dashboard.
The road from 1998 to today has clearly been a bit bumpier than Microsoft might have wished, given that only 27 models worldwide are currently offered with Windows Automotive preinstalled. A business deal with Magneti Marelli and Fiat could see that number increase dramatically in the near future, however.
More intriguing was Warren’s suggestion that Windows Automotive 5.0 has been designed to more readily accept upgrades after fitment.
This could be a good thing: software errors identified after your car leaves the factory could be fixed more simply at the next service.
It could also be a very bad thing. As desktop PC users will be well aware, Microsoft has a habit of moving things around from one version of its software to the next. Does anyone really want that hire-car, where’s-the-windscreen-wiper feeling every time they get their own car back from the garage? Or worse, bearing in mind the wireless, net-connected vision that Microsoft espouses, the software could change randomly between journeys, in the way that some digital TV set-top boxes currently update themselves over the air.
If updates to in-car software are not done sensitively, the car of the near future could be a very confusing place to be.

True cost of road pricing

Those who are already worried about Alistair Darling’s controversial road pricing scheme should be positively fearful, if Germany’s experience of GPS-based road pricing for trucks is anything to go by.
Problems with the Toll Collect system have been many, ranging from the usual delayed start and cost overruns of big public sector IT projects, through to embarrassing engineering miscalculations. Sin-bin lay-bys built to hold trucks stopped for non-payment were designed with an optimistic idea of how quickly computers could capture a number plate and check a central database. Once in action, this meant that the lay-bys were too close to the gantries containing all the cameras and computers - guilty trucks had gone by before anyone could tell if they should be stopped. Moving the gantries or lay-bys would be costly, so the politicians' solution was adopted: the traffic was slowed down to keep pace with the computers.
Worse, when problems of inconsistent billing became obvious, the German government rushed through a law under which Toll Collect never has to prove that it has charged the correct toll - instead it’s up to the victim to demonstrate that they have been charged the wrong amount.

Navigation dangers

Navteq, maker of the digital maps behind navigation systems from Alfa Romeo, Ford, Land Rover, Garmin and others, this week crowed about new business deals bringing it detailed digital maps of both South Korea and Russia. Given that South Korea is still officially at war with North Korea, and that Russia is not exactly the safest place in the world to be driving around when you’re not a local, if you’re particularly excited by Navteq’s news, perhaps you ought to think hard about what kind of car you should be driving...

Prius not to everyone's taste

London's congestion charge recently increased from five pounds to eight pounds. To coincide with this upswing in daylight robbery, Toyota has begun advertising its Prius hybrid in central London, highlighting the fact that it is exempt from the charge with the slogan: "There's no C in Prius", with the distinctive congestion-charge symbol standing in for the capital-C.
It's a neat campaign, but the slab-sided, small-wheeled Prius still has a few hurdles to overcome in the popularity stakes.
As one wag put it, standing opposite the poster at Tottenham Court Road Tube station yesterday: "There's no C in butt ugly, either."

Cure caravan-tower's wiggle

Anyone who travels by single-carriageway country routes will have noticed that it’s caravan season, again. ESP maker Bosch reminds us that as well as clogging up the nations arteries, caravan drivers also pose a danger to themselves and to others. Travel too fast, ignore crosswinds, load a caravan poorly, and soon the tail will be wagging the dog.
According to Bosch the only thing to do when a caravan, horse-box or other trailer starts to sway is to slow down. Sadly some drivers believe that a bit of corrective steering will allow them to press on regardless, but all too often this will simply amplify the pendulum effect and put the whole wobbly mess in the ditch.
Starting with the BMW X5 in 2001, Bosch has been supplying makers with ESP systems programmed to detect the characteristic swaying and to do the sensible thing: cut the revs and apply the brakes for a moment. The anti-sway system is activated whenever a trailer is connected electrically at the towing hitch.
Car buyers keen on haulage should ask suppliers if the system is fitted to their tow-car of choice.

ESP in the EU

A trawl through the web site of automotive systems maker Bosch revealed this set of statistics, revealing that the UK lags behind the EU average in the fitment of electronic stability systems (ESP) in new vehicles. For vehicle registrations in 2004, Bosch estimates the following rates of ESP installation:

• EU average: 36%
• Germany: 64%
• France: 39%
• Spain: 30%
• UK: 24%
• Italy: 20%

Given that TVR sports cars can’t entirely account for the UK’s shortfall, it seems likely that the figures are a direct result of manufacturer cost-cutting, in markets that aren’t sensitive to the lack of electronic aids.
Autocar’s campaign to raise the profile of ESP is to be applauded.

Optical cruise control

The upcoming new Mercedes-Benz S-Class will offer an updated Distronic Plus cruise control system that works even in stop-start traffic, apparently. It uses dual 24GHz and 77GHz radar systems to detect the car in front, and to maintain contact with that vehicle.
Not to be outdone by the Germans, Japanese boffins have dreamed up an alternative approach using passive optical sensing of the car in front.
Celoxica, Calsonic Kansei and researchers at Keio University today unveiled their system, which uses licence-plate recognition to calculate the distance and position of other vehicles.
Heavy-duty geeks will be interested to know that, to reduce power consumption and packaging problems and to speed up recognition, the experimental system is based on field-programmable gate arrays, rather than a central processor.
It could prove cheaper than the sophisticated radar alternative. However, unlike the Mercedes system, it probably won't help if, say, a crate falls off the back of the lorry in front of you.

iPod prepared

This month's Top Gear magazine lists the rather short tally of UK cars that arrive with iPod connection facilities as standard (rather than an extra-cost option):

Citroën C1; Peugeot 107; Toyota Aygo; Land Rover Discovery 3, Range Rover and Range Rover Sport; Hyundai Sonata; and Ford Mondeo, C-Max and Focus.

Top Gear does seem to have neglected the Smart ForTwo i-move special edition. Perhaps because it's a special edition, and therefore not really a standard car. And also because, rather than being iPod-ready, it arrives with an actual 20GB iPod as part of the package.

Hybrids cause confusion

The traditional car magazines - mostly staffed with petrolheads rather than geeks - are having a tough time coming to terms with some new motoring technologies. The current issue of the UK's Test Drive magazine is a good example. It reviews the Lexus RX 400h hybrid 4x4 and dutifully explains that its gear selector will be a bit unfamilar to most drivers:

In addition to the usual Park, Neutral and Drive positions, there's also a B (battery) gear selector that keeps the CVT gearbox locked in electric mode. This whizzes the heavily soundproofed, superbly damped car along in complete, pollution-free silence.

All well and good, except that it's completely wrong. In this car, as in Toyota's Prius MkI and II, the B position is actually a hill-descent mode.
Hybrids use regenerative braking to turn momentum into electrical energy, and to maximise this effect the engine is decoupled from the drivetrain when braking. This is fine in most conditions but on a long or steep downhill road the lack of engine braking can not only be a bit unnerving for the driver, but can also lead to overheated brakes. Hence the B (Braking) mode, which in the Lexus puts both the front and rear electric motors into generator mode, rather than the front alone, beefing up the rolling resistance.
It does make one wonder whether Test Drive actually took the RX for a test drive...
No doubt the mainstream mags will become more familiar with how hybrids actually work in the coming months.

Update: Top Gear magazine cuts through the above confusion nicely in its review of the RX 400h, published last week:

Controls and driving procedures all are as per normal.

Nicely precise journalism from road tester Paul Horrell...

Mirror finish for auto-TV

Lots of blogs are reporting on the danger presented by a review-mirror-mounted LCD panel offered by in-car screen specialist Lilliput, triggered by some iffy marketing of the device by online retailer Case-mod.com, suggesting that it might be fun to watch a movie on the motorway. In reality, of course, this is the perfect place to put the monitor for a rear-facing parking camera, particularly given that the mirror reverts to normal, reflective duties when the LCD element is powered down.

Software flaws lie in wait

Les Hatton, Professor of Forensic Software Engineering at the University of Kingston, makes some alarming observations in an opinion piece for IT Week, published this time last year.

“Modern cars have reached seven figures when measured in lines of code, distributed across up to 100 microprocessors... a really good [software] system will manifest less than one defect (a fault that leads to failure) per 1,000 lines in its entire lifecycle. About 10 percent of these defects will be show-stoppers. It's really hard to stay this low, so it means that if you put two million lines in a car, then you will have around 200 serious defects waiting to fail. This of course is only if you have done a really good job.”

What Hatton doesn’t mention is that the 200 serious software faults are highly unlikely to surface during “normal” driving. Flaws evident in normal operation are the ones that get picked up, not the ones that get missed.
Very little software testing is exhaustive - instead tests tend to dwell on ensuring that the software does what it should do. Relatively little effort is put into ensuring the software doesn’t do what it shouldn’t do. The reason is economic - there are a finite set of “good” results, but a potentially infinite set of bad results that could arise but probably won’t. This makes testing for the unexpected expensive.
What does all this mean?
Serious software flaws are most likely to arise in extreme situations. Given that a great deal of automotive IT is devoted to safety systems, that means that we may not be quite as safe as the brochure would lead us to believe. The car may well not do what it says on the tin, when things go pear-shaped.

Sign language

With the increasing proliferation of speed cameras, it would help if DaimlerChrysler could hurry up and bring its road-sign recognition system to market. The system analyses the view of the road ahead and picks out visual features likely to be warning signs, speed limit signs, etc. The data can then be used to reinforce the warning by displaying a replica of the sign on a digital dashboard or head-up display.

Information overload

The San Jose Mercury News has an excellent article on some of the projects under way at Volkswagen's normally hush-hush Silicon Valley skunkworks. The most intriguing is an LCD glass overlay for the instrument cluster, that offers the option of the normal transparent mode or an opaque mode that appears much like a laptop screen, with the option for bitmapped colour graphics. The prototype panel is divided into three sectors, allowing some or none of the analogue dials to remain visible. The report suggests the work will be ready for on-the-road mule testing this year; so could reach production - presumably in Audi A8, Bentley, Lamborghini, or VW Phaeton models to begin with - in 2007. However, while displaying complex information in the instrument panel may be preferable to putting it away down in the centre console, as most cars currently do, the driver still needs to look away from the road - and for longer than the almost instinctive glance that's sufficient to check speed, rpm, temp, etc. Head-up displays, as used in Chevrolet Corvette, are probably a better long-term bet for providing rich data such as pre-emptive information about upcoming junctions.

Freedom to spin

This PDF datasheet from Microsoft, extolling the virtues of its Windows Automotive 4.2 embedded software for the benefit of carmakers, employs an image depicting the exhiliration of motoring: an open-topped sports car; an open road; a young couple with a suitcase tossed behind the seats, setting off for unspecified adventure but unable to contain their enthusiasm and thus forced to fling arms into the air. But look closer. The car is from decades ago: a 1960s Triumph Spitfire, by the look of the clocks and the flow of the wings either side of the bonnet.
Does automotive IT really square with this image? And could Microsoft not have found a picture more in keeping with the product it is pushing?