Think back to the days of your childhood and playing hide and seek. The game would have been much easier if you could actually see through and around the trees, rocks and walls that obscured your friends.
For all the advances that have been made in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) over the past 20 years, seeing through the other cars to find out what is happening further down the road is still a problem. However, it’s a problem that Nissan is trying to fix with predictive forward collision warning that is coming to the updated Altima sedan for 2016.
Predictive collision warning actually debuted two years ago on the Infiniti Q50 and this year, Nissan is bringing it to more mainstream models including the redesigned Murano and Maxima in addition to the Altima. The problem Nissan engineers are trying to solve is that you can’t see through a rolling block of metal and glass to know if other vehicles beyond are suddenly slowing down.
In the coming years, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications will help resolve this problem by having cars beam short messages to each other if a driver hits the brakes suddenly, encounters a slippery patch on the road or detects a vehicle approaching a blind intersection. However, the first V2V systems won’t start coming to market until 2016 and will take several years to proliferate.
In the meantime, Nissan is harnessing the radar sensors that are already being used for adaptive cruise control to “peak around” the car directly in front. Normally, the radar pulses are sent directly forward and the time that elapses for the reflection to come back after bouncing off the vehicle ahead is used to calculate the distance to that vehicle and its speed relative to your car. Nissan is also bouncing pulses off the ground below that car in the hope of catching the next vehicle up in the line.
While the primary target straight ahead is used to control speed for the adaptive cruise control and provide automatic emergency braking if a collision is imminent, the secondary target is only looking for the sudden deceleration that occurs when a driver slams on the brakes. If that second car slows down, you get a visual and audible warning that can help prevent or at least minimize the impact of a chain reaction collision.
According to Nissan engineers, the system works pretty reliably in a variety of road conditions including rain or snow but it is somewhat dependent on the ground clearance of the car ahead of you. If you’re following a Nissan GT-R you’re less likely to get a warning, but then again you have a better chance of seeing over or around the GT-R than you would if you were following a Titan or Armada.
The 2016 Altima is still a long way from being autonomous, but every time a manufacturer adds another ADAS feature like this novel collision warning system, it increases the car’s situational awareness and gets us another step closer to the goal of releasing the steering wheel. For now at least the cars down the road are a bit less able to hide.
