Skip to main content

Plug-and-play anti-collision technologies for everyone

With an eye on the autonomous vehicle market, Soterea, a new high-tech firm in New Jersey, US, is developing plug-and-play anti-collision technologies that can make new and used vehicles safer, thereby helping to further evolve the critical element necessary to make driverless vehicles commercially viable. Soterea is the brainchild of two transportation technology experts, Eva Lerner-Lam and Alain L Kornhauser, each with more than four decades of experience in developing next generation technologies for
March 6, 2014 Read time: 3 mins
With an eye on the autonomous vehicle market, Soterea, a new high-tech firm in New Jersey, US, is developing plug-and-play anti-collision technologies that can make new and used vehicles safer, thereby helping to further evolve the critical element necessary to make driverless vehicles commercially viable.

Soterea is the brainchild of two transportation technology experts, Eva Lerner-Lam and Alain L Kornhauser, each with more than four decades of experience in developing next generation technologies for transportation systems. The two have now teamed up to provide individual vehicle owners and fleet operators in the US and abroad with key technologies needed to make almost all vehicles, not just new, expensive ones, safer.

“Today’s vehicle crash warning and active prevention technologies are available as premium features on top-of-the-line, new vehicles,” says Lerner-Lam. “We’re developing affordable, “plug-and-play” kits for virtually all vehicles, even those that did not come with anti-collision systems installed at the factory.”

Soterea is integrating state-of-the-art technologies from around the world for the kits and exploring unique partnerships with technology institutes, insurance companies, auto dealers, auto service centres and fleet operators for distributing them globally.

“Crash mitigation and avoidance technologies are evolving at breakneck speed, far faster than a typical car owner’s new or used car purchase cycle,” says Kornhauser. “With in-vehicle wireless communications and electronic steering, braking and throttle controls on almost all new vehicles made since 2012, there’s no reason why warning and prevention devices can’t be installed and updated on virtually any vehicle on an after-market basis, significantly enhancing the overall safety of our streets and highways—for everyone.”

Beyond the immediate application of anti-collision technology today for everyone, the promise of self-driving cars has captured the imagination of urban planners, transportation industry professionals and ordinary citizens. “But,” says Lerner Lam, “Self-driving vehicles won’t happen until they can demonstrate that they can be trusted to avoid collisions. We have to achieve safer driving vehicles in order to achieve self-driving ones.”

“It’s an exciting time for everyone who needs or provides transportation,” adds Kornhauser. “Self-driving technology can provide a professional driver's response when the human behind the wheel is drowsy or distracted, thus benefiting everyone on the road. Getting anti-collision technologies onto new and used vehicles is the first step in this transportation revolution. The rest will be history.”

Related Content

  • Need for harmonisation in ITS standards
    February 1, 2012
    As the calendar rolls over, and we hop from continent to continent and World Congress to World Congress, where Memoranda of Understanding and cooperation agreements are the headline news, it is easy for those not intimately involved to forget that standards definition is a well-nigh continual process. Significant progress has been made in recent months towards achieving the critical mass and economies of scale which are going to drive development and deployment in, amongst other things, cooperative infrastr
  • The benefits of combining enforcement and traffic management
    February 27, 2013
    Jason Barnes considers how combining enforcement equipment with other traffic management technologies might benefit our future – if only the will were really in place to do so. During the ITS World Congress in Vienna in October last year, Navtech Radar and Vysion­ics ITS announced a strategic partnership that would combine the expertise of Navtech in millimetre-wave wide-area surveillance technology with Vysionics’ machine vision-based automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) and average speed measurement
  • Your Tesla Autopilot has arrived
    October 20, 2015
    In a blog on its website, Tesla Motors, which since October 2014 has been equipping its Model S car with hardware such as a forward radar, forward camera, electric assist braking system, to allow for the incremental introduction of self-driving technology, has announced the release of Tesla version 7 software. Called Tesla Autopilot, it allows those tools to deliver a range of new active safety and convenience features, designed to work in conjunction with the automated driving capabilities already offered
  • 'Choose your own adventure': ITS World Congress All-Access
    September 15, 2020
    The Los Angeles ITS World Congress has moved online: Shailen Bhatt of ITS America explains to Adam Hill why everyone should get involved in this global conversation – and how networking will still be a key element because 'human beings are gregarious, we want to be together'