When I open the door of my car a beep sounds off to tell me "Hey you idiot you left the key in the ignition", another beep tells me the safety belt is not hooked up and yet another reminds me that the head lights are on or the back door is ajar.
This is all well and good, although a some what passive annoyance to me.
Volvo, a Swedish automobile manufacturing company with Ford Motors owning the majority shares, has just come out with its own "Star Trek" version of collision detection technology, calling it "City Safety" and aims to release this new feature on some models within two years. The technology works via an optical radar in the upper windshield that calculates the distance and speed of the car immediately ahead of you, doing so 50 times per second. The computer then wrenches the control of the car from you, engages the brakes accordingly if the system detects that a crash is imminent. Toyota Motors came out with a similar setup that was announced way back in August 2008, Volvo's apparently has the added computer aided benefit of being able to "steer away from a potential collision" as well.
I'm not to keen on the idea of turning over braking controls to a computer,
and definetly not steering, but on the other hand I look at the jet planes that pretty much fly by computer controls. I'm not sure about this new type of computer technology control over these things, for now I'll stick to braking and steering myself, thank you.
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