Cars to become safer with radar and black boxes

By CHARLES ARTHUR

The car of the future will be safer but at a cost, both in terms of hard cash and the privacy of motorists.

Within five years cars will have built-in radar which is able to sense other vehicles, children or pets in the blind spots towards the back.

But privacy advocates object to another innovation being introduced in European cars: "black box" systems that will be able to record what the car - and its driver - did in the moments leading up to a crash.

"It's Orwellian," says Simon Davies, director of the civil liberties group Privacy International.

"If you owned a car with one in, you would have to release the data from a crash or else your insurance company wouldn't pay up. But it's a dangerous jump to take."

Other technologies now in development will make cars harder to steer towards obstacles to either side - and even introduce "drive-by-wire" systems such as those used in aircraft, which would mean that the steering wheel was not directly connected to the car's wheels.

Peter Bell, business manager of the automotive unit of independent firm Cambridge Consultants, says the extra cost of such systems could be just £300 ($814).

"Putting short-range radar into the back and sides of the car would take about 18 months to produce a single component that suppliers could offer to car makers, and then - because they move very slowly - it would be another couple of years before we started seeing them for sale," says Mr Bell. "And some time after that you could have longer-range radar built into the front of the car, which would act to warn about or even avoid crashes."

The "blind spot" radar would be linked to alert systems in the dashboard, which might sound an alert or flash a light when a car in the driver's blind spot came within a certain distance.

Cambridge Consultants has developed a prototype version of a radar-equipped car, which can tell the difference between cars, adults, children and kerbs behind it, based on their height.

That is seen as the most urgent need, because in modern people-carrier vehicles small children are not visible from the driver's seat when they are standing behind the car: "There have been lots of toddlers knocked down by their own parents in their drives," says Gordon Oswald, associate director at the company.

Some cars already have ultrasonic sensors in the back bumper - but these cannot distinguish objects' size or height, and do not work well in some atmospheric conditions.

The prototype projects what is behind the car on to a screen mounted in the back of the car, although Mr Bell says car makers would have to consider carefully the best place to put such a display.

"You don't want it in the front, because it would be confusing to look forward and try to work out what's left and right. It might be something you would project on to the rear-view mirror.

"But that's something for the makers to worry about."

- INDEPENDENT