Cars.com Auto Review
Hi, I'm Kelsey Mays from Cars.com.
Modern automotive safety systems today go well beyond antilock brakes
and electronic stability control. In fact, some cars are even able to warn you
of a collision to come. We'll talk about how those systems work
and cover some of their implications with Mark Woirol,
an automotive safety expert from Allstate. Mark, thanks for joining us today.
Thanks, Kelsey. I appreciate you having me on. I'm a big fan of what Cars.com does.
So tell me about these systems. How do they work? What do they do?
Well, there's a lot of different systems that are on the market.
So when we look at safety systems in an automobile,
you have crash avoidance systems, we have lane departure systems,
we have advanced headlight systems, we have backup systems that are in place.
We have mitigation systems. So each one that are in vehicles
are set up to do specifically a different task to protect.
Are these systems -- we've seen a lot of them in luxury vehicles;
are some of them coming out in non-luxury vehicles,
in the Chevys, the Toyotas, the Fords of the world?
Yeah, they are. Typically, the higher end vehicles have always been
the ones that kind of start the ball rolling with these systems,
but in today's marketplace, you can take a Ford Focus as a prime example.
They have a low speed crash avoidance system that's built into the vehicle.
They also have a system built in to where the vehicle,
such as Lexus a few years ago, it will park itself in a parallel park.
Wow. So do these systems actually steer you away from an impending collision,
or do they warn you? Do they stop you? How does that all work?
There's vast differences between most of the systems.
I'll give you two examples. When you look at front driver systems
that are out there for -- you could have a low speed system,
or a low impact braking system, and you have a high speed system.
So if I look at the Volvo system, which is called City Safe,
it's made to where at crashes under 20 miles an hour, through a laser and a camera
mounted in front of the rearview mirror, it will track a car in front of it
and literally stop the vehicle from an impact. It's built for the urban environment.
Whereas if you look at a high speed system -- I'll use BMW system
as a prime example; it's a 4-phase system.
Traveling at speed on a major highway, the system will warn you
of an impending problem. Phase 2, it will actually pre-charge the brakes to potentially stop.
Phase 3 gets into the situation to where okay, as a driver, you haven't done anything,
so it's going to actually start to apply the brakes for about a second and a half
to slow the vehicle down. And Phase 4, the system literally understands
"Crash is imminent; we're going to have an effect here."
It will literally slow the car down, evasive breaking
to try to minimize the impact as well as reposition the vehicle
and the people in the vehicle to help them from an injury standpoint.
What are all the implications of this? If your car is really trying
to mitigate collisions and you really idiot-proof the car,
well, aren't we just all going to become more idiots behind the wheel?
No, I think we all agree, Kelsey, that the driver still is the one
that's in control of the vehicle. At the end of the day, it's about giving
additional tools to them so when they drive, to make it safer.
Allstate Insurance Company was one of the first companies to get
behind airbags and putting them into vehicles as far as stability control.
Our position is this is just another tool to help the driver be aware of the driving public.
So it sounds like you'd agree with the statement that
the #1 safety feature in a car is really the driver.
Absolutely.
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