Crash-evading cars on the horizon

Human error is a factor in 75 to 90 per cent of crashes, according to studies from around the world. Photo / Natalie Slade

Vehicles that talk to each other to avoid collisions will be the next major advance in automotive safety as carmakers gear up to introduce ground-breaking new vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology.

The V2V-equipped cars are expected to be launched in Europe and the United States by 2015. Australian carmakers say they are on target too.

But GM Holden's vehicle regulation and certification manager, Mike Hammer, who oversees vehicle design regulations for Holden's domestic and export programmes and serves as industry-government liaison through the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, has warned authorities of the need to establish the standards and governance framework required for its implementation.

Speaking at the second Australian Intelligent Transport Systems summit on the Gold Coast, Hammer said V2V technology could be one of the single biggest automotive safety advances since the invention of the seatbelt and electronic stability control.

"A friend of mine's got this proximity warning device on his glider," he said. "We were up flying a few years ago and it told us there was another glider flying below us and I thought it was a fantastic system that we ought to have on cars.

"There's a lot of research around the world now because, as our vehicles become safer, the role of human error in crashes is becoming more dominant - particularly things like side impacts, which mostly occur below the speed limit and are usually the result of driver error."

Website GoAuto reports that a field study completed in June by Melbourne's Monash University Accident Research Centre found that, of 25 participants driving a 21km urban route including 29 intersections, the drivers made an average of 12 errors per drive.

"Half the errors occurred at intersections and there were actually four instances of people failing to stop at a red light even though they knew they were in a car that was being monitored," said Hammer, an electrical and computing systems engineer with 30 years' experience in the automotive industry.

Similarly, a statistical study by the University of Adelaide's Centre for Automotive Safety Research concluded that 87 per cent of crashes in South Australian urban areas were caused by people making simple road-user mistakes.

North America's peak road safety body, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), has estimated that co-operative intelligent transport systems (ITS) could help in 81 per cent of police-reported light-vehicle crashes involving unimpaired drivers. And the Monash University team has forecast that intelligent vehicle safety technologies like V2V could reduce serious road injuries by up to 35 per cent.

"These improvements are well beyond even the most ambitious government targets and what could be achieved with other technologies," said Hammer. "There are similar studies overseas which have come to the same conclusion. What they're saying is the vast majority of crashes are [caused by] people making mistakes - it's not bad behaviour. And a lot of our road-safety policies at the moment are focused towards driver behaviour. They're not really focused towards error tolerance - making the system error-tolerant.

"Estimates on the contribution of human error to road-traffic crashes vary from 75 to 90 per cent.

Human error is inevitable, but it should not result in death or serious injury. So really what we need is a second set of eyes, a guardian angel that intervenes if a crash is imminent.

"The automotive industry is firmly focused on safety as the No1 priority for co-operative ITS, and V2V as the lead technology.

"Vehicle safety development in the future will focus on actively assisting the driver not to make errors."

The association of Australian and New Zealand road safety and traffic authorities, Austroads, estimates that a 1 per cent reduction in road crashes would save $230 million a year, while a 1 per cent reduction in road congestion would save $120 million.

Hammer told GoAuto that active safety features such as anti-lock braking systems (ABS) and electronic stability control (ESC) could be viewed as the first error-tolerant technologies to appear in vehicles because they compensated for driver mistakes, but because they had been so effective, driver error played an increasingly large role in multi-vehicle collisions.

"NHTSA has recently stated that stability control is significantly reducing the number of off-road and rollover crashes in the USA, so the automotive industry is now firmly focused on safety as the No1 driver of co-operative ITS systems.

"V2V is the lead technology within that, so the global vehicle manufacturers are getting together to agree on protocols and standards and probably in the next five to 10 years we'll start seeing vehicles with these new safety systems on them."

Essentially an all-around object detection system, V2V makes vehicles aware of others close by and is immune to false alarms, fog and rain.

Proponents say V2V is one of the few technologies effective for prevention of side impacts and intersection collisions, and that its low cost means that every vehicle can have these latest crash-avoidance and driver-assistance capabilities.

V2V technology was first seen in GM prototypes as early as 2004 and the same crash-avoidance technology is employed in a range of autonomous vehicle trials - which also use follow-the-leader radar-based cruise control, lane-departure warning and other technologies already available in many luxury cars - that could lead to cars that drive themselves on Australian roads within a decade.

"A lot of these technologies are available now, but you tend to see them on expensive vehicles. The beauty of V2V is it's very inexpensive - it's just a GPS receiver with no fancy radar," Hammer said. "Because it's cheap, it can be used on all cars, and even cyclists can carry transponders."