David Crawford reviews technological progress with automatic incident detection Highway safety problems are likely to intensify given recent predictions of future traffic growth across the world. In the United States, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reports that currently over 30,000 deaths and 1.5 million injuries occur as the result of accidents on the nation’s roads each year. These figures will increase with the number of kilometres travelled each year in the US expected to gr
Waymo, the company that began as Google’s driverless car project, has pledged to open a facility in Michigan, US, to produce advanced autonomous vehicles (AVs).
In a statement, Waymo insisted: “This will be the world’s first factory 100% dedicated to the mass production of Level 4 AVs.”
Level 4 automation means that no human interaction is required, and the vehicle is able to adjust in the case of things going wrong – but there is an option for manual override. This is still some way from Level 5, in
Sleeping while a driverless car speeds you to your destination has long been touted as the dream of the new technology – and something of a nightmare for safety campaigners.
A new video from the BBC shows exactly what happens if a driver falls asleep in an autonomous vehicle (AV).
In the filmed test, the AV prompts the driver to resume control when approaching roadworks on a motorway. When the driver fails to act, the vehicle comes to a halt and automatically parks in a lay-by.
Motor industry research
