Richard Yarrow’s opinion for www.startrescue.co.uk, providing low cost Vehicle Recovery.
It’s being hailed as “an important milestone on the path towards accident-free car driving”, and presumably the need to use your car breakdown cover as a result. It’s called Temporary Auto Pilot (TAP) and a quick glance at the picture above will give you an idea of what it’s all about. Okay, we can all take our hands off the steering wheel briefly, but would you want to do it at 80mph for mile after mile?
Volkswagen has unveiled a car that can be driven semi-automatically on motorways and dual-carriageways. TAP maintains a safe distance to the vehicle ahead, drives at a speed selected by the driver, reduces this as necessary to deal with slower traffic or before a bend, and maintains the vehicle’s central position between the white lines marking out the carriageway. The system also observes overtaking rules and speed limits.
It uses a combination of radar, ultrasound and laser scanners linked to a camera and an electronic horizon. The idea is to prevent accidents caused by errors from an inattentive or distracted driver. The experts who have created it say one conceivable scenario would be in monotonous driving situations, eg, in slow-moving traffic jams.
Clever as it sounds, it doesn’t abdicate the driver of all responsibility so he or she can do the crossword or apply make-up. The driver must continually monitor it, and can choose to disable it at any time.
TAP is part of an EU project called Highly Automated Vehicles for Intelligent Transport (HAVEit), set up to develop research concepts and technologies to prevent accidents. Various of the big-name car makers are involved, with the plan that they all work on the same technology and share the cost, rather than building expensive and different ones that all do the same thing.
So is it a good idea? I suppose, but if we were just more attentive as drivers we wouldn’t need it. I guess the problem is we’re human and easily distracted. That said, I think we can all appreciate 80mph is pretty fast. I would want to know it’s 100 per cent guaranteed bulletproof safe before I took my hands off the steering wheel.
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