News

To support the rapid growth in vehicle production and airbag fitment rates in Asia, Autoliv has begun the construction of an airbag cushion manufacturing plant in Chonburi, near Bangkok. The company’s existing airbag cushion plant in Thailand opened just two years ago. The new facility will have capacity to produce 4.6 million cushions corresponding to 15 per cent of Autoliv’s global manufacturing capacity for 'cut & sewn' textile cushions for airbag systems. Autoliv also produces 20 million highly autom

TRW, a specialist in active and passive safety, says it has been awarded new business for its next-generation electric park brake (EPB) technology with two major North American based vehicle manufacturers. The system functions as a conventional hydraulic brake for standard service brake applications, and as an electric brake for parking and emergency braking. TRW launched the first integrated caliper EPB system in 2001 and is bringing the wide range of functional and ancillary benefits of EPB to the North A

Fontinalis Partners, a strategic investment firm, has invested in San Francisco-headquartered SQLstream Inc., which claims to be the first standards-based stream computing platform to enable companies to exploit and monetize their real-time service and sensor data.

Iteris has announced that it has delivered a milestone 100,000th Vantage vehicle detection camera to the traffic management industry and has been deployed by hundreds of agencies in North America, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. The Vantage sensor system can capture and analyse video images through sophisticated algorithms, providing traffic engineers accurate vehicle detection information. Iteris says the versatility of the product enables users to apply a wide range of detection applicat

UK company, Traffic Technology Limited will install ten pedestrian and cycle counters on behalf of local authorities in and around the town of UK town of Bicester, Oxfordshire, as part of the new Eco Bicester project.

UK-headquartered mobile surveillance solutions manufacturer WCCTV has announced that its Tower product has been granted Type Approval status for use on UK railway infrastructure by Network Rail. The Tower, the only equipment of its kind to win type approval, is a complete all in one surveillance system which has been designed to operate at trackside. It is non-conductive and can be quickly and easily installed. The system can be self-powering for up to eiht weeks and provides live video from a heavy duty ca

Collaboration between industry participants will be essential to bring alternative fuel applications to market, according to PwC's latest publication Charging Forward: Electric Vehicle Survey. While automakers continue to bring electric vehicles (EVs) to the marketplace, governments, local municipalities and utility companies are challenged with building the infrastructure required to support these vehicles long before mainstream consumption will take hold. PwC surveyed over 200 executives across multipl

Car fleet renewal schemes (cash for clunkers/car scrappage) introduced in the US, France and Germany fell short of their potential to deliver on environmental and safety objectives, according to a new report published by the International Transport Forum at the OECD and the FIA Foundation today.

Marcus Nyström, researcher at the Lund University Humanities Lab, in Sweden, has revealed that the lab is currently developing a product that will be able to test if a person is too tired to drive. The project uses eyetracking, where a driver is required to follow a moving ball and his eye movements and pupil reactions are evaluated to determine if he/she is too tired to drive safely.

Navteq has established a pan-European reseller agreement with Esri Schweiz under which the GIS specialist will be able to provide customers with a complete set of Navteq geodata which, depending on individual requirements, can be supplied in formats optimised for use within Esri software.

American Traffic Solutions (ATS) is claiming a robust second quarter that saw 28 communities sign contracts/notices to proceed for 274 red-light and speed-compliance safety cameras, a sharp increase from the 29 contracts/notices to proceed for 170 cameras in the first quarter.

The Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) in the US has released the first comprehensive overview summarising distracted driving research for state officials. The report considered research from more than 350 scientific papers published between 2000 and 2011.

Axeon has announced it is one of six British companies to receive funding from the UK's Technology Strategy Board for feasibility studies into the recycling and re-use of batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles. As well as researching the recycling process, the project will look at how to determine end-of-life, which is still a major issue with automotive batteries for both manufacturers and consumers.

The National Coalition for Safer Roads (NCSR) has released new research showing that New Jersey residents who took part in a survey it commissioned overwhelmingly support the use of red light safety cameras. The poll found that 77 per cent back the use of cameras at busy intersections in New Jersey, with 43 per cent saying they ‘strongly support’ the cameras.

According to Germany's Federal Statistics Office, Destatis, the number of people who died in road traffic accidents in Germany decreased by 12 per cent to a 60-year low of 3,648 in 2010 compared to 2009. Paradoxically, the number of accidents registered by the police rose by 4.3 per cent to an 11-year high of around 2.4 millon. The increase in the number of accidents has been put down to the exceptional weather conditions, in particular in the winter season.