Pedestrians are in trouble.
Between 2015 and 2016, the U.S. saw an 11 percent uptick in pedestrian deaths, and there’s no sign that the trend is changing course.
What’s an automaker to do? If you’re Ford, you design cars to do a better job of detecting pedestrians. If you’re Waymo (which isn’t necessarily an automaker…yet, you design cars that are pedestrian-friendly in other ways, like being softer.
Yes, Waymo has filed a patent for a softer car that could potentially cause less damage to pedestrians in the event of a collision.
Adapting vehicles to be kinder to human bodies isn’t a new idea. Volvo created a pedestrian airbag back in 2012, and plenty of automakers have created semi-autonomous software capable of spotting pedestrians in the road. Before it was Waymo, Google’s self-driving car project even patented a flypaper-like device to adhere pedestrians to vehicles, minimizing opportunities for further injuries after a collision.
This new patent is a bit different–though in fairness, it’s not as wacky as it might sound. Waymo isn’t pioneering the development of new materials that would make a marshmallow-soft vehicle, as tasty as that might sound. Instead, Waymo’s patent involves autonomous driving software that makes adjustments to a vehicle’s body when the vehicle collides with a pedestrian.
To read more of the original article, go to The Car Connection.
