The Truth About Advanced Auto Tech and Safety in 2019 By Raj Vardhman

We can’t live without automobiles, but some of us die because of them. While many car crashes are caused by drivers, motor vehicles were largely unsuccessful in preventing accidents and protecting passengers, pedestrians, and other road users.

Thankfully, advanced auto tech has made traffic-related incidents less fatal.
Automatic emergency braking enables a vehicle to stop during a potential collision, which is a useful feature since a car can react to such a situation faster than its driver. Lane Departure Warning and Lane Keeping Assist systems help keep a vehicle stay in the right lane.

Moreover, blind spot detection serves as another eye to avoid hitting something or someone behind the car. A rear-view camera likewise assists a driver when reversing. Safe Exit Assist, on the other hand, temporarily hinders passengers, especially children, from opening the back doors when a vehicle detects an automobile or bicycle is approaching from the rear.

More cutting-edge innovations are expected to become the standard safety features of reasonably priced automobiles in the coming years. However, not all auto technologies may be able to protect lives. Quite the contrary, some of the promising vehicle advancements featured by carsurance.net in the infographic may put road users in danger.

In-Car Speech Recognition

A 2015 study in the United States shows that interacting with a smartphone through voice commands while driving is a major cause of distraction. The activity creates more mental workload for motorists than talking to a passenger. Dealing with a voice-activated system may involve a complex command, taking a driver’s mind off the road in the process.

What is worse is a driver who uses in-car speech recognition technology gets distracted by 27 seconds on average after using the service. A less complex voice-activated system can leave a driver distracted for 15 seconds after the completion of interaction, which is far shorter but still too long.

There is probably no way to talk to your car without getting mentally distracted to some extent, so it is imperative to be extremely cautious when to do it. Until voice-activated systems require practically no effort in the part of drivers, they are likely to cause drivers to lose their focus when used in transit.

Augmented Reality

Like in-car speech recognition technology, a heads-up display (HUD) is designed to keep a driver from looking down when checking an instrument cluster. Seeing key information about vehicle speed and fuel level, among others, at the bottom of a windscreen is definitely cool, convenient and practical.

What many experts do not talk about much, though, is this kind of augmented reality technology is prone to misuse.

There is no limitation yet on what can appear on a windscreen, so a HUD may display unimportant details that can cause unnecessary distraction. For instance, putting up a music playlist just to choose a song to play fills a windscreen with so many visuals, making it harder to concentrate on driving.

Autonomous Driving

The future of the motoring industry belongs to self-driving cars, and they promise to reduce car crashes significantly. This notion may hold true since machines do not get intoxicated or become high. The advent of autonomous vehicles should contribute a lot to the reduction of road collisions stemming from drunk driving.

When an accident is inevitable, though, an autonomous vehicle may be forced to choose who to protect. A driverless car could not always save everybody when a collision is unavoidable, so it might have to spare more human lives over fewer or to decide to save younger individuals over older ones. The software developers of autonomous automobiles are probably losing sleep over this moral dilemma.

No auto tech, no matter how advanced, can eliminate the danger of driving a motor vehicle. The key is to use each one responsibly and to recognize the limitations of every innovation to use all of them to safe effect.

Author’s bio

Raj Vardhman is Head of Marketing & Tech at carsurance.net. He’s a self-made white hat SEO expert and WordPress virtuoso—passionate about developing new SEO strategies with nominal budgets on WordPress. Raj loves designing, travelling, photography, fabulous food, and even better conversation.

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