What can be done to prevent deadly car rammings?
A deadly attack this week in Melbourne, Australia, in which a man plowed an SUV into a crowd of Christmas shoppers comes from the same playbook used by terrorists in recent years around the globe. Many new vehicles rolling off car lots in the United States are equipped with technology that causes them to automatically stop if someone walks in their path. As more and more terrorists use vehicles to plow into crowds, the question has arisen in the auto industry: Can advances in technology thwart future attacks? And are there other ways to prevent the ubiquitous automobile from being used as a weapon?
Autonomous emergency braking systems automatically stop vehicles before a collision if a driver doesn’t react, though it’s not foolproof.
“For sure the technology is there to detect the pedestrians. The technology is there to automatically brake the vehicles,” Jeremy McClain, director of technology in North America for Continental Automotive Systems, said earlier this year.
Most systems now, including Continental’s, let the driver overrule the vehicle’s computer, largely because the systems have only a few camera or radar sensors and may pick up false signals.
Some systems will automatically stop a vehicle if the driver doesn’t, while others will slow it to mitigate crash damage. Already some are sophisticated enough to detect people who are walking. One version of Toyota’s safety system has sensors that will stop a car from moving in a parking lot if they detect something in its path, even if the driver accidentally hits the gas instead of the brake.
The systems are rapidly getting more accurate with laser sensors, and more powerful computers and artificial intelligence are being added as the industry rapidly moves toward self-driving cars. McClain said the cars could, in a relatively short time, be tasked with stopping drivers who have evil intent. “You’d have to consider all the circumstances, but you could definitely do it,” he said.
Continental has had early discussions with automakers about using the systems to stop terrorists, he said. But such a use is far into the future, and many automakers haven’t considered it yet.
Even when the technology is ready, it will take years for roughly 250 million older vehicles now on the road to be replaced with those equipped with the new technology. Only 19 percent of 2017 models have the technology as a standard feature, although four of 20 automakers say it’s now standard on more than half their models, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Twenty companies have agreed to equip almost all of their vehicles with the feature by Sept. 1, 2022.