5 Future Technologies That Improve Automotive Safety
By Alexander Klotz, Head of Technical Center India, Continental Automotive India
The global automotive industry has been pushing boundaries to develop sophisticated technology that makes driving safe, reliable, and self-sufficient. Now emphasizing on the road safety aspect, the industry is collectively focused on creating a future with zero crashes and incidents, under the shared vision, Vision Zero.
The latest technological advancements have transformed the way people imagined safety technologies. From indicating alerts about the speed levels to advanced braking capabilities, technologies have made the vehicles around much safer, smart, and reliable.
Below are the five technologies that improve safety
Transparent Hood
The “transparent hood” function is one of its first kind to hit the market. It makes the area under the hood visible and allows the driver to see terrain and obstacles that would otherwise not be visible. The transparent hood is based on Continental’s Surround View system, which consists of four satellite cameras and an electronic control unit.
An intelligent image processing algorithm reconstructs the image below the vehicle and inserts this image exactly into the surround-view displayed to the driver. Continental received the CES 2020 Innovation Award in the product category Vehicle Intelligence and Transportation for this innovative technology.
Contact Sensor System (CoSSy)
The new CoSSy detects contact between a vehicle and a person or object at cutting speed. CoSSy helps to make applications like automated parking safer. The recording of sound signals by CoSSy can be used to detect collision impact at low speed so that the vehicle can be stopped immediately.
To read more: Business World Auto
About the author
Alexander Klotz is the head of Continental’s Technical Center India (TCI), the in-house R&D center of Continental Corporation. In this role, Klotz is responsible for the growth of the center into a trusted partner augmenting Continental’s global R&D competence. In this regard, he oversees the growth of competence, innovation potential and capacity.
Prior to this, Klotz was Director R&D within Continental’s Vehicle Networking and Information business area (formerly Interior division), responsible for advanced product development and systems engineering. Klotz has more than 18 years of automotive engineering experience, in areas spanning vehicle testing, project management, customer and product strategy, simultaneous engineering and innovation. His experience includes assignments in USA and Japan and covers safety relevant products like ESC and ADAS as well all Interior products, such as instrument cluster and HUD.
Klotz also launched and led the Silicon Valley office for Continental in 2013. In this role, he was connecting traditional automotive with consumer electronics companies and start-ups to find new technologies and business models.
