Top 10 coming-soon car technology!
13 December 2004, 04:38 AM
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Top 10 coming-soon car technology!
1: Emotional Recognition
This one is a BMW project and a long way from being perfected yet, or even from being vaguely practical. But it’s already quite scary – in-car technology that recognises your emotions and reacts to them. So if something comes on the radio that you don’t like (say Mozart rather than Eminem, or vice versa) and you groan, it seeks another station. That’s putting it a bit simply, of course, but it’s at the heart of the system, distinguishing between ‘positive, neutral and negative’ expressions and acting accordingly. Like most of BMW’s control technologies, it’s intended mainly as second-level back-up to ‘ordinary’ voice control, but eventually it could work on facial expressions as well as degrees of grumpiness. Frown and grumble at the same time and who knows what might happen. However, there may be myriad applications: for example, it may sense you are angry, and as a result switch the traction-control and speed-limiters to maximum - maybe even without an over-ride, by law...
2: Gesture Recognition
Another from the BMW ‘Projekthaus’ worklist – wave your hand at the audio system and it changes CD tracks, or radio stations, or volume, without you having to touch a thing. They’ve apparently been working on it for several years but it doesn’t have a very big ‘vocabulary’ yet, and the major problem is filtering out the gestures that aren’t meant to mean anything, so that you won’t have to drive with your hands in your pockets if you don’t want the audio system behaving like a DJ’s mixing desk. Oh, and there may have to be special versions for French and Italian drivers
3: Lane Departure Warning
You’ve probably seen the Citroen TV ads – the C4 on the spindly one-lane bridge a mile above the bottomless canyon with no guard rails and the driver thinking about other things while driving at several hundred miles an hour. But don’t panic, the on-car sensors have seen the car drifting across the white line for no obvious reason, and the alert signals have told the driver to put his book down for a minute. Nissan has a similar system on its Infiniti brand in the USA, and more will undoubtedly follow.
4: Drowsiness Alert
Another of the more important systems, because of its safety benefits. We’ve all seen the motorway warnings, ‘Tiredness Kills, Take a Break’ – and at some time or other most of us have felt the heavy eyelids at the wheel, and woken up with a jolt in the dark when we’ve seen the huge black rabbit that turns out to be nothing but a bridge. This system (and several manufacturers, led by Nissan are working on versions of it), watches your eye movements, and especially blink rates and droopy lids. If you’re slipping away, it will alert you, and that’s a very good idea indeed. There was also a version a while ago that sprayed reviving fragrances into the car if you were nodding off (apparently mint was especially effective), but we haven’t heard of that one for a while.
(For the person who took 16 mins to park a micra).........
5: Automatic Parking
The wheel-scuffer’s dream – you simply drive along a row of parked cars, the system senses where there’s a space big enough for your vehicle to squeeze into, you hand over control to the on-board electronics, take your hands and feet off everything, and the car parks all by itself, without expensively graunching the kerbs or rudely nudging your neighbour’s bumpers. Scary to watch, and doesn’t yet give you change for the parking meter, but BMW has a prototype version that works.
6: Ion Air Conditioning
Nissan already has this on Cube and March (aka Micra) in Japan, where, apparently, ‘in the quest to relax and de-stress, ionising has become a craze. . . everything from bin liners to bracelets and hoovers to hair dryers have a “minus ion” feature. Not sure how it works with bin liners, but in the car, a ‘built-in Plasmacluster Ion generator’ (we’re not making this up, honestly) produces positive and negative ions from water and oxygen molecules in the air. The ions gang up around ‘naughty wee microparticles’ (the press office’s words) like microbes, funghi, viruses and airborn pollen, and render them inactive. When the air is clean, the system releases negative ions – the stress reducing ones that make you happy, tranquil and potentially more healthy. Another good one.
7: Intelligent Cruise
In the beginning, cruise control simply allowed you to set a chosen speed and your car would stick to it until you either turned it off, touched the brakes, or hit something more solid that was travelling more slowly than you were. Later systems (and Jaguar among others have a particularly good one) also sense slower moving traffic in front of you and instead of charging straight into it at your set speed, back off and keep a safe distance (which you can also set). The best versions of all, and we’ve driven prototypes, also include a ‘crawling’ function, where the sensors react to very slow moving traffic (we’re talking in town here, or M25), and keep the car moving in line without you having to do anything but steer.
8: Hydrogen Power
Mazda is about to test ‘the world’s first “street-legal” dual-fuel hydrogen rotary H2RE’ – that’s an RX-8 that runs on either petrol or hydrogen at the flick of a switch. The benefits of hydrogen are, on the face of it, enormous – zero carbon dioxide emissions and virtually zero NOx emissions. In fact nothing much nastier than water comes out of the exhaust, and basic performance is comparable with the petrol version.
There’s always a catch, though – or possibly several: BMW are also committed long term to hydrogen power and recently set speed records with the wacky racer H2R seen at the Paris Motor Show in September. It set speeds of up to 187mph, but even with a hydrogen tank the size of Ipswich it only set records up to ten miles. It’s an important direction, but there’s plenty of drawing board time to come.
9: BMW Dog Safety Harness
This isn’t quite as high tech as some of the others here… The BMW straight news-release description: ‘thanks to a webbing system that attaches to the standard three-point seatbelt system, a dog can be safely strapped in for the duration of the journey. Crash research shows that unrestrained animals can become lethal projectiles in the event of an accident, and this simple to install device will negate the risk. Three differing sizes of harness are available offering protection for dogs from 7-40kgs’. (Maybe that should have read ‘from’ dogs from 7-40kgs, and it’s hard to imagine a cat falling for a similar indignity – just think a snarling ball of spitting, hissing fury and you’ll get the picture...)
10: Personalisation
Surely the current top of the tree when it comes to weirdness, and as seen on Nissan’s ‘content rich’ Actic concept car. Actic’s intelligent key fob has no less than 100 gigabytes of memory, crammed with all the personal settings you could ever need, for everything from the ordinary stuff like seat and mirror positions and audio preferences, to more advanced options like e-mail and sat-nav settings – and most off-piste of all, ‘the content that governs mood and ambience’. This includes ‘the sky theatre glass panelled roof design’, an array of overhead video display screens that lets the driver ‘play with the relationship between exterior and interior environments with custom video displays’. So if you want to change night to day, or stormy weather to a sunlit sky filtering through trees – no problem. Just the job for confusing BMW’s mood recognition...
-Schumacher
This one is a BMW project and a long way from being perfected yet, or even from being vaguely practical. But it’s already quite scary – in-car technology that recognises your emotions and reacts to them. So if something comes on the radio that you don’t like (say Mozart rather than Eminem, or vice versa) and you groan, it seeks another station. That’s putting it a bit simply, of course, but it’s at the heart of the system, distinguishing between ‘positive, neutral and negative’ expressions and acting accordingly. Like most of BMW’s control technologies, it’s intended mainly as second-level back-up to ‘ordinary’ voice control, but eventually it could work on facial expressions as well as degrees of grumpiness. Frown and grumble at the same time and who knows what might happen. However, there may be myriad applications: for example, it may sense you are angry, and as a result switch the traction-control and speed-limiters to maximum - maybe even without an over-ride, by law...
2: Gesture Recognition
Another from the BMW ‘Projekthaus’ worklist – wave your hand at the audio system and it changes CD tracks, or radio stations, or volume, without you having to touch a thing. They’ve apparently been working on it for several years but it doesn’t have a very big ‘vocabulary’ yet, and the major problem is filtering out the gestures that aren’t meant to mean anything, so that you won’t have to drive with your hands in your pockets if you don’t want the audio system behaving like a DJ’s mixing desk. Oh, and there may have to be special versions for French and Italian drivers
3: Lane Departure Warning
You’ve probably seen the Citroen TV ads – the C4 on the spindly one-lane bridge a mile above the bottomless canyon with no guard rails and the driver thinking about other things while driving at several hundred miles an hour. But don’t panic, the on-car sensors have seen the car drifting across the white line for no obvious reason, and the alert signals have told the driver to put his book down for a minute. Nissan has a similar system on its Infiniti brand in the USA, and more will undoubtedly follow.
4: Drowsiness Alert
Another of the more important systems, because of its safety benefits. We’ve all seen the motorway warnings, ‘Tiredness Kills, Take a Break’ – and at some time or other most of us have felt the heavy eyelids at the wheel, and woken up with a jolt in the dark when we’ve seen the huge black rabbit that turns out to be nothing but a bridge. This system (and several manufacturers, led by Nissan are working on versions of it), watches your eye movements, and especially blink rates and droopy lids. If you’re slipping away, it will alert you, and that’s a very good idea indeed. There was also a version a while ago that sprayed reviving fragrances into the car if you were nodding off (apparently mint was especially effective), but we haven’t heard of that one for a while.
(For the person who took 16 mins to park a micra).........
5: Automatic Parking
The wheel-scuffer’s dream – you simply drive along a row of parked cars, the system senses where there’s a space big enough for your vehicle to squeeze into, you hand over control to the on-board electronics, take your hands and feet off everything, and the car parks all by itself, without expensively graunching the kerbs or rudely nudging your neighbour’s bumpers. Scary to watch, and doesn’t yet give you change for the parking meter, but BMW has a prototype version that works.
6: Ion Air Conditioning
Nissan already has this on Cube and March (aka Micra) in Japan, where, apparently, ‘in the quest to relax and de-stress, ionising has become a craze. . . everything from bin liners to bracelets and hoovers to hair dryers have a “minus ion” feature. Not sure how it works with bin liners, but in the car, a ‘built-in Plasmacluster Ion generator’ (we’re not making this up, honestly) produces positive and negative ions from water and oxygen molecules in the air. The ions gang up around ‘naughty wee microparticles’ (the press office’s words) like microbes, funghi, viruses and airborn pollen, and render them inactive. When the air is clean, the system releases negative ions – the stress reducing ones that make you happy, tranquil and potentially more healthy. Another good one.
7: Intelligent Cruise
In the beginning, cruise control simply allowed you to set a chosen speed and your car would stick to it until you either turned it off, touched the brakes, or hit something more solid that was travelling more slowly than you were. Later systems (and Jaguar among others have a particularly good one) also sense slower moving traffic in front of you and instead of charging straight into it at your set speed, back off and keep a safe distance (which you can also set). The best versions of all, and we’ve driven prototypes, also include a ‘crawling’ function, where the sensors react to very slow moving traffic (we’re talking in town here, or M25), and keep the car moving in line without you having to do anything but steer.
8: Hydrogen Power
Mazda is about to test ‘the world’s first “street-legal” dual-fuel hydrogen rotary H2RE’ – that’s an RX-8 that runs on either petrol or hydrogen at the flick of a switch. The benefits of hydrogen are, on the face of it, enormous – zero carbon dioxide emissions and virtually zero NOx emissions. In fact nothing much nastier than water comes out of the exhaust, and basic performance is comparable with the petrol version.
There’s always a catch, though – or possibly several: BMW are also committed long term to hydrogen power and recently set speed records with the wacky racer H2R seen at the Paris Motor Show in September. It set speeds of up to 187mph, but even with a hydrogen tank the size of Ipswich it only set records up to ten miles. It’s an important direction, but there’s plenty of drawing board time to come.
9: BMW Dog Safety Harness
This isn’t quite as high tech as some of the others here… The BMW straight news-release description: ‘thanks to a webbing system that attaches to the standard three-point seatbelt system, a dog can be safely strapped in for the duration of the journey. Crash research shows that unrestrained animals can become lethal projectiles in the event of an accident, and this simple to install device will negate the risk. Three differing sizes of harness are available offering protection for dogs from 7-40kgs’. (Maybe that should have read ‘from’ dogs from 7-40kgs, and it’s hard to imagine a cat falling for a similar indignity – just think a snarling ball of spitting, hissing fury and you’ll get the picture...)
10: Personalisation
Surely the current top of the tree when it comes to weirdness, and as seen on Nissan’s ‘content rich’ Actic concept car. Actic’s intelligent key fob has no less than 100 gigabytes of memory, crammed with all the personal settings you could ever need, for everything from the ordinary stuff like seat and mirror positions and audio preferences, to more advanced options like e-mail and sat-nav settings – and most off-piste of all, ‘the content that governs mood and ambience’. This includes ‘the sky theatre glass panelled roof design’, an array of overhead video display screens that lets the driver ‘play with the relationship between exterior and interior environments with custom video displays’. So if you want to change night to day, or stormy weather to a sunlit sky filtering through trees – no problem. Just the job for confusing BMW’s mood recognition...
-Schumacher
13 December 2004, 08:53 AM
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Or the BMW SMG box on the new M5
Originally Posted by www.sniffpetrol.com
BMW's brand new M5 has stunned road testers with its performance, handling and a remarkable 11 separate modes for the car's seven-speed SMG sequential gearbox. However, despite claims that this is simply "too many" modes, engineers in Munich are said to be hard at work on even more selectable options for future versions of the semi-manual transmission. "You can never have too many modes," said one high-ranking engineeringer. "That's why the next generation SMG will come with over 100 user selectable settings, almost all of them bafflingly pointless. To begin with there will be some fairly obvious choices such as 'Sport' which offers a more aggressive change strategy, 'Track Sport' which offers even more aggressive change strategy, and 'Club Sport' which offers a change strategy so aggressive that on every upchange the car will literally smack the driver in the face with a big club. These settings will be joined by other sport modes including 'Lucozade Sport', 'Sky Sport' and 'Dickie Davies' World Of Sport'"
However, our Munich source says that this is just the tip of a very silly, gearbox-related iceberg. "The real developments for the next SMG system will come in automatic mode," he claims. "Traditional autoboxes typically feature just a simple 'Winter' mode. We will take this to the next logical step with 'Spring', 'Summer' and 'Autumn' modes, plus additional settings including 'Drizzle', 'Light Breeze', 'Slightly Overcast' and 'Oooh, It's Mild For The Time Of Year' modes".
Our BMW spy also claims that further developments may include modes selectable on the basis of the driver's mood, including 'Comfort', 'Tired', 'Bloody Annoyed' and 'Strangely Wistful'. However, he denied recent rumours that we may also in future see a 'Shouldn't You Have Decided On The Car's Settings For Us Since You're The ****ing Engineers' mode.
However, our Munich source says that this is just the tip of a very silly, gearbox-related iceberg. "The real developments for the next SMG system will come in automatic mode," he claims. "Traditional autoboxes typically feature just a simple 'Winter' mode. We will take this to the next logical step with 'Spring', 'Summer' and 'Autumn' modes, plus additional settings including 'Drizzle', 'Light Breeze', 'Slightly Overcast' and 'Oooh, It's Mild For The Time Of Year' modes".
Our BMW spy also claims that further developments may include modes selectable on the basis of the driver's mood, including 'Comfort', 'Tired', 'Bloody Annoyed' and 'Strangely Wistful'. However, he denied recent rumours that we may also in future see a 'Shouldn't You Have Decided On The Car's Settings For Us Since You're The ****ing Engineers' mode.
13 December 2004, 07:16 PM
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Interesting...
I can imagine in many years time, looking back and thinking "remember when we used to drive" Rather than being driven... Or, "rememeber when you could powerslide over a roundabout!"
Worrying...
MB
I can imagine in many years time, looking back and thinking "remember when we used to drive" Rather than being driven... Or, "rememeber when you could powerslide over a roundabout!"
Worrying...
MB
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