BMWs are a pain in the neck

The non-profit Motor Insurance Repair Research Centre – more widely known by the name of the nearest town, Thatcham - carries out research designed to reduce the cost of motor insurance claims. For consumers, the welcome spin-off can be better automotive products that help to prevent thefts and injuries, ranging from immobilisers to better bumpers.

It recently completed a study into how effective seats and head restraints are at preventing whiplash.

It has tested a huge variety of models and ranked each as poor, marginal, acceptable, or good, noting whether the restraints actively move during a crash to offer improved support.

Some results are very surprising: out of 10 tests, BMW scores none at the good level, two at acceptable, two at marginal, and a whopping six models at poor. If you drive a 3-Series or X5, consider buying a neck brace. And even those buyers forking out for the seat upgrade and opting for powered active head restraints in their X5 may be alarmed to see that it still gets a big thumbs down, rated as poor.

Hyundai Getz and Sonata drivers, meanwhile, enjoy budget active head restraints that actually work and are rated as good.

Worth reading if you’re buying a new car and value your neck.

Lexus radar is a little too neat

The Lexus-sourced illustration, left, appeared on page 43 of the special 110th anniversary edition of Autocar (click the pic for a bigger version). It illustrates the radar controlled Pre-Crash Safety System fitted to the new Lexus IS220d.

It does make one wonder where Lexus gets its radar components. Plenty of military boffins would dearly love to get their hands on a radar with a perfectly rectangular beam cross-section.

In reality, radar beams are a lot less neat and tidy. They are lumpy things. They might have a strong main beam of oval cross-section but will also have a number of lesser side beams pointing up, down and to the sides of the main beam.

These so-called sidelobes have the potential to create false reflections that can confuse the system – this appears to be the problem faced by Mercedes in its recent embarrassing TV incident, given that technicians blamed the fabric of the building surrounding the ill-fated Merc, even though the way ahead was clear for the main beam to penetrate the fog.

Talking of fog, millimetre wavelength radar works well in fog, mist, dusty conditions and in ordinary rain, but works a lot less well in very heavy rain made up of large droplets. Presumably makers of cars equipped with radar-based systems warn owners that they should put less faith in the system when it’s really hammering down?

Well, given the misleading nature of the Lexus picture, probably they don’t.

Perhaps radar assistance systems ought to be deactivated when the wipers are on their maximum setting...

S-Class crash: the devil in the details

Officially the Stern TV Mercedes-Benz S-Class cock-up was caused by metal interfering with the radar that was supposed to trigger the car's Brake Assist Plus system.

Closer inspection of the images over at Stern TV suggests another, more elemental force may have been at work. Was it really wise to try the test in a car with that particular number plate?

Confusion caused Mercedes crash

The embarrassing pile-up of Mercedes S-Classes captured by Stern TV reveals more than most pundits might realise. The most significant is that it highlights the gulf between what most people perceive to be the role of the car maker and its actual role.

The automatic braking facility that Mercedes hoped to show off is not a Mercedes system at all – it was designed and built by a parts supplier. In this case Continental – a firm rather better known for making tyres than sophisticated radar-controlled autopilots.

Mercedes may give the public the impression that its own ingenuity lies behind all the S-Class’s cleverness, but in truth its role does not run so deep. It is just the systems integrator, not the master developer. And as such, it may not understand the foibles of the little pieces of technology that go to make up its cars as deeply as it might let on.

One thing is certain: given the company’s excuse that the structure of the building confused the radar, S-Class drivers had better not rely on the electronics when queuing to exit a multi-storey car park.

Night vision coming soon

Parts maker Bosch has confirmed that the innovative night-vision system it developed for Mercedes-Benz - as seen in the new flagship S-Class - "will be available in other cars as well in the future".

What those other cars might be is anyone's guess - arch rival BMW already offers a rival system developed by Swedish parts maker Autoliv.

Volkswagen Group is arguably the most likely recipient, but it will probably be a while before you can specify see-in-the-dark systems in your Skoda, sadly.

Aston gives lessons in annoyance

The marketing people who dream up slogans to promote auto brands really ought to stick to their brochures and keep at least 100 paces away from the actual cars.

As revealed on the latest edition of Top Gear TV programme, when the new Aston Martin V8 Vantage is started up, the little screen in the dashboard goes through its own boot up process. And just as Microsoft Windows makes its annoying little fanfare when it has finally chugged into life, so the Aston does its own little marketing-led pirouette, flashing the words “Power”, “Beauty”, and “Soul” up on the screen before settling into displaying actual vehicle metrics.

It’s not a great idea. Anyone prepared to fork out the cash required to see the message every day will already have been seduced by whatever marketing people think is wise - or will more probably have made up their mind regardless of the current “Power, Beauty and Soul” push. Hammering home the slogan day after day thereafter won’t increase the owner’s likelihood of buying another Aston – in fact the smug little trio of words might just irritate owners enough to do the reverse.

In-car screens ought to deliver useful information or nothing at all.

It’s unlikely that restraint will prevail, however. No doubt the same idea will soon permeate every vehicle with an active display, and be taken to its illogical extreme. In years to come, the motor probably won’t start until you’ve sat through the latest TV advert, relayed by wireless to your dashboard display.

How does Toyota do it?

Academic research partnership the Cambridge-MIT Institute has invited Yoshio Ishizaka, one of the top bods at Toyota in Japan, to air the contents of his brain on the topic of future automotive trends.

Apparently he will be giving a talk about Toyota’s “vision of the future of mobility”, and specifically about its plans for the next five years in the realms of safety, performance and environmental impact. He’ll also be giving a few tips on the art of business management, which Toyota does seem to do better than most of its peers.

There will be time in the 90-minute schedule for a Q&A session, for those keen to ask if the Prius is still losing money and not quite as green as it’s cracked up to be, say.

You’ll probably have to attend in person to put such awkward topics to the man. The lecture will take place on Tuesday 22nd November 2005 at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK.

You can register to attend in person. It doesn’t seem to cost anything, but don’t blame Auto IT if you get a bill for £500 afterward.

Fortunately the whole thing will be webcast live starting at 5pm GMT [12pm EST] on the day.

Danger in round-trip delay

Some more detail about one of the car-to-car comms systems demonstrated at the ITS World Congress this week comes via digital map specialist Navteq.

The experimental system built into two BMW cars is called Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) and is backed by Navteq, BMW, Motorola and Volkswagen.

VII uses a centralised approach, according to Navteq: “Prototype vehicles [send] vehicle sensor data to the processing centre. Once processed, this data [is] broadcasted and displayed on VII-enabled navigation systems in prototype vehicles. [At the ITS event] Motorola will demonstrate the output of this processing through a website that displays the location and severity of road hazards on Navteq maps.”

While the broadcast and subscribe model is the only way to pool data for maps, it is surprising that there is not a peer-to-peer element. Perhaps there is, and Navteq neglects to mention it.

In life or death situations milliseconds may count, and the round-trip delay involved in sending a message to a central co-ordinating centre and back will be unavoidable. Not counting processing time, a round trip to a processing centre just 10 miles away cannot take less than 100 microseconds.

Direct communication between cars on the same piece of road has to be desirable if this kind of work is to prevent motorway pile-ups, for example.

Car-to-car communications

Wired News has just posted some coverage of the 12th Annual World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, being held in San Francisco this week.

Among the tech that Wired has singled out is GM’s version of car-to-car wireless information systems:

GM equipped two cars with wireless transponders that broadcast various pieces of information such as speed and braking status to nearby cars. When one car brakes in front of another, even one down the road and out of sight, a small icon on the dashboard of the trailing vehicle indicates a stopped automobile up ahead.

The LA Times also has a story about the same conference - its reporter rode in a BMW equipped with a similar system:

On a test track at SBC Park, home of the Giants, a black BMW sport sedan splashing and skidding through a big puddle immediately signaled the silver vehicle behind it to watch out. "Slippery road 50 feet ahead," flashed the message on a display screen in the silver car.

There is tremendous potential in this kind of automated communication between vehicles, particularly when one car can signal to others that an emergency system such as ABS or an airbag has been triggered.

Previous Auto IT items have noted the Japanese Advanced Safety Vehicles effort, coordinated by the Japanese government. European manufacturers kicked off a similar initiative, called Car2Car, with a consortium involving BMW, DaimlerChrylser, Fiat, Renault and Volkswagen Group, plus major parts suppliers – including Japanese firms such as NEC.

Clearly car-to-car comms will be more worthwhile if every major manufacturer is involved

Taking issue with CAR's columnist

Gavin Green, CAR magazine’s best columnist, this month has a typically pithy thing or two to say about the lamentable lack of progress towards an affordable and usable environmentally friendly vehicle. The gist is good, but the details are patchy, however.

He takes the Frankfurt motor show to pieces and mentions the moronic me-too moves of European makers that ought to know better: “Take Audi, one of the most technically progressive makers of the late 20th century. Its latest take on Vorsprung durch Technik was a vast, fuel consumptive SUV, the Q7.” No argument there.

He then goes on to bash hybrids. “I know hybrids are clever ... but these ‘green machines’ are less efficient than a normal car on a motorway or country road (did you not realise, pious Prius driver, that you are lugging a redundant electric engine and an adult-sized stack of batteries – also redundant – when you ply the M1?)”

I’d argue that neither the motor nor the batteries are redundant. He neglects the notion of regenerative braking, which must surely come into play on a country road, particularly for that increasingly common breed of driver that feels a desperate need to brake for every single bend in the road.

And on the M1 too, it’s not exactly a once-in-a-lifetime experience to find yourself driving along a motorway at walking pace or less, stuck in a tailback, when again the hybrid is more virtuous than conventional equivalents.

It’s easy to say that a hybrid is less efficient in these circumstances, but some evidence would be welcome.

He wraps up by asking “Where was the single- or two-seater city vehicle, narrower and smaller (so two road lanes can become three) and far less fuel consumptive than today’s ‘small’ cars?”

Well, it may not have been at Frankfurt, but that particular recipe sounds like a lot like the Tango from Commuter Cars.

Biometric door handle? No thanks

This story over at New Scientist seems a bit optimistic. Apparently Hitachi has developed a biometric device that reads the pattern of finger veins in your hands as you tug at your car door handle, unlocking the door if the correct hand is doing the tugging.

In general biometrics have one or two benefits and a host of drawbacks. In this case the benefits are that it’s hard to pretend to be the owner of a particular hand when you’re not, and that you can’t lock your hand inside your car by accident.

The drawbacks tend to centre on problems like being locked out because you have a bandage on your thumb, or being refused entry because your hands are dirty, or simply not being recognised because there’s road-grime or bird-shit on the sensor. Or because it’s freezing cold and your finger veins have shrunk. Or, for that matter, because it’s freezing cold and you’re wearing gloves.

Never mind that biometric systems tend to have a failure rate even under optimum conditions that you just don’t get with a metal key.

This seems like an innovation with more drawbacks than benefits. Of course Hitachi probably doesn’t really mean to sell this thing to carmakers, but is showing the system off at the Tokyo motor show to get a bit of publicity. Significantly, it looks like the hand in Hitachi's picture is opening a freezer door. Guarding the ice cream – now that’s the kind of job that you can trust to a biometric sensor.