Foresight
Most modern cars are equipped with numerous driver assistance systems that can relieve the driver of tasks. Thirty years ago, there were plenty of experiments with this in the Netherlands. Then we saw early predecessors of systems that are already well established.
Things have moved very quickly over the past ten years when it comes to driver assistance systems. We are no longer surprised if a car can take over part of the steering, automatically adjusts speed if necessary, or applies the brakes in the event of an imminent collision. In 1992 all of that was of course still something of the future. In the summer of 1992, AutoWeek took a look at TNO, which was working on such systems in collaboration with the University of Groningen and the TU in Delft. They did this with a car that in itself is already special to spot: a Dodge Mini Ram.
The Dodge in question was no longer a very modern-looking car in 1992, but inside it was special high tech to. Until then, yes. Instead of two rows of seats, you found a kind of office in the back, full of the most modern technology of that time. It was all meant to work on driver assistance systems. With this car, TNO tested predecessors of such things as Lane Departure Warning, adaptive cruise control and a navigation system on a large screen.
It was already clear at the time that such systems would not be used in production cars for a long time: “The intelligence car project has been in the works for three years, and it will take another three years before the system is fully developed and applicable. well and well established, the year 2000 will already be a thing of the past.” The least noticeable gadget on board, in a sense, was the navigation system. It was not explained exactly how that worked. The focus was mainly on the presentation. The Dodge Mini Ram had a screen next to the instrument panel, on which the next step of the route could be read. Not only that, it also indicated with sound what you had to do as a driver. This system would then return the fastest in practice, with the first integrated navigation systems.
Smart steering wheel
Much more futuristic was the ‘smart steering wheel’. You can consider this as a precursor to Lane Departure Warning. The car wasn’t able to keep you in line yet, but it did give you a warning if you drifted out of your lane. “Sensors on the roof monitor the road markings and warn the driver with a small steering movement if he deviates from his line. The steering wheel is not taken over by the technology, the driver simply remains in control.”
Smart accelerator
The ‘smart accelerator pedal’ in TNO’s Dodge was in a sense an even more complex system. After all, the car kept an eye on what the vehicle was doing in front of it and could respond to this with the accelerator pedal. “A radar registers the distance to the object in front of the car and, based on the speed of the car and the speed of the object, calculates the collision distance in seconds. If the time to a possible collision is less than four seconds, the smart accelerator pedal kicks in. by slowing down.” A kind of forerunner of adaptive cruise control, so.
What makes it all the more impressive, when you consider that we’re talking about 30 years ago, is that the car was able to ‘learn’ from the driver’s behaviour. For example, the steering wheel and accelerator would not always have the same response, but one that was in line with the driver’s habits at the time. dr. WH Janssen of TNO explained: “If the driver often keeps too little distance, the system knows this and will intervene later. In short, if the owner is a sucker, the system takes this into account. If he drives well, the system will only intervene if the owner really makes a mistake. In 95 percent of the cases, the driver intervenes before the system has to do it, but the point is also to eliminate the remaining 5 percent.” Not only did the accelerator pedal ‘adapt’, but so did the steering wheel: “If the driver often drives 1.5 meters from the road markings, the system stores this in memory and knows that it does not have to warn immediately if that happens.”
Autonomous driving
These were, of course, the first major steps in the field of driver assistance systems, but autonomous cars were not yet involved. At the time, the belief was that fully self-driving cars would have to wait until 2050: “Then we will all get on board of those half-spheres that find their way silently and flawlessly. The technology is there and will be introduced irrevocably,” says Janssen. .
.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl