Fully autonomous vehicles that drive themselves from point A to B are still in the future, but braking systems that step in to slow or stop a vehicle without the driver’s intervention are here today, and about to become more common.
Automatic braking will eventually make cars safer, reduce injuries and the cost of accidents, but there will be hiccups along the way. They will not prevent all collisions, and they will generate a new category of quality complaints for automakers and vehicle owners.
That’s because not all automatic braking systems are created equal. If you think drivers get annoyed by bad voice recognition or finicky audio and climate controls, just wait ‘til they start reacting to phantom braking, false-positive collision alarms and collisions that happen despite the fact that their car has automatic braking. Tuning the systems correctly will be vital not just for safety, but for customer satisfaction.
The technology for automatic braking is still in its early days, but regulation and consumer demand is rapidly pushing it into more vehicles around the world.
“We are seeing a steady increase in consumers who want technologies like automatic braking, as they hear more about them,” AutoTrader senior analyst Michelle Krebs says.
In a new study, AutoTrader found 70% of consumers want automatic braking, self-parking and other driver aids.
The U.S. government was considering making automatic braking mandatory, but BMW, Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo agreed earlier this year to work with regulators and the insurance industry on a voluntary plan to put them in all vehicles. The timeframe hasn’t been set, but the parties agreed all new cars will come with the system “in the near future.” In regulatory terms, that probably means five to eight years.
Other automakers that didn’t sign that initial agreement are sure to follow suit. The history of the last two decades shows that customers vote for safer vehicles with their pocketbooks. For instance, curtain air bags are not mandatory, but try to find a new vehicle without them. They began as an added feature on low-volume premium models, but became ubiquitous.
The same thing is happening with automatic braking. Many vehicles offer versions of it now. Some promise to bring the car to a complete halt, others step in when a collision is inevitable to reduce the violence of impact. Some recognize pedestrians, others can only detect vehicles. Systems that will spot large animals like deer are also in the works.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says 1% of 2015 vehicles had standard automatic braking. The system was optional on 26%.
Each automaker has its own software engineers, its own level of hardware and its own idea of what the system should do. That leads to a vast difference in how automatic braking systems work.
Read more of the original article in Detroit Free Press
