All opinions are mine and mine alone.
Driving a car is dangerous. Official statistics suggest that around two million people lose their lives on the road every year. Hence, car manufacturers and public health officials do everything that they can to warn people of the dangers and minimize risks.
Doing that, however, is easier said than done. Cars are still very much under the control of human drivers. And they tend to make mistakes.
That, however, is starting to change. For the first time in history, we now have cars that can sense their environment and make decisions, independently of the people controlling them.
It sounds like a brave new world. And it is. Machines will have the ability to make split-second, life-or-death decisions. Human drivers will take a back seat.
Perhaps the most important of all of these innovations is forward collision avoidance.
Forward collisions are among the most common, but they’re also a surprisingly simple thing to solve. Every year, millions of drivers career into the back of stationary vehicles. It is one of the most common accident types. People come to assume that the traffic in front of them is moving at the same speed as they are. If the car in front slows down suddenly and they’re not paying attention, it can lead to an accident.
These types of collision, however, are eminently avoidable with the right technology. There’s nothing particularly complicated about them. And you could have a machine monitoring the situation the entire time, so you don’t have to rely on the driver all the time.
The way these systems work is a little bit like police radar. The sensor shoots out a radio wave that judges the speed at which you are approaching the vehicle in front and then uses that to calculate risk. When the risk is low, it remains silent. If, however, an accident seems likely, it will slam on the brakes, without any driver input.
The benefits are enormous. Of all the car damage claim types, shunt damage is among the most common. When you hit a stationary car from the rear at speed, you trash the back end and put the occupants at risk of neck injuries.
You can also do a lot to cut your insurance premiums. The vehicle effectively enables you to avoid one of the most common types of collision, lowering your expected insurance premiums in the future.
There’s now ample evidence that this new technology is saving lives. The number of accidents continues to go down as technologies improve. But this is the first example of one that doesn’t rely on improving driver skill or protective materials around the vehicle. Given the advances in technology, cars can make their own choices.
Of course, these systems aren’t perfect yet. Manufacturers need to work out how to make it so that they don’t put on the brakes in the wrong situation. A driver could be quite happily weaving in and out of cars, for instance, but the system engages the brakes anyway. With that said, this is certainly something that will make a big difference in the future.
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