Auto-braking is coming, but not all are equal
Ready or not, automatic braking is coming to a car near you, and probably sooner than you expect.
Fully autonomous vehicles that drive themselves from point A to B are still in the future, but braking systems that step in to slow or stop a vehicle without the driver’s intervention are here today and about to become more common.
Automatic braking will eventually make cars safer, reduce injuries and lessen the cost of accidents, but there will be hiccups along the way. They will not prevent all collisions, and they will generate a new category of quality complaints for automakers and vehicle owners.
That’s because not all automatic braking systems are created equal. If you think drivers get annoyed by bad voice recognition or finicky audio and climate controls, just wait till they start reacting to phantom braking, false-positive collision alarms and collisions that happen despite the fact that their car has automatic braking. Tuning the systems correctly will be vital not just for safety, but for customer satisfaction.
The technology for automatic braking is still in its early days, but regulation and consumer demand are rapidly pushing it into more vehicles around the world.
“We are seeing a steady increase in consumers who want technologies like automatic braking, as they hear more about them,” Autotrader senior analyst Michelle Krebs says.
In a new study, Autotrader found 70 per cent of consumers want automatic braking, self-parking and other driver aids.
The U.S. government was considering making automatic braking mandatory, but BMW, Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo agreed to work with regulators and the insurance industry on a voluntary plan to put them in all vehicles. The timeframe hasn’t been set, but the parties have agreed all new cars will come with the system in the near future. In regulatory terms, that probably means five to eight years.
Other automakers that didn’t sign the initial agreement are sure to follow suit. The history of the past two decades shows that customers vote for safer vehicles with their pocketbooks. For instance, curtain air bags are not mandatory, but try to find a new vehicle without them. They began as an added feature on low-volume premium models, but became ubiquitous.
The same thing is happening with automatic braking. Many vehicles offer versions of it now. Some promise to bring the car to a complete halt, others step in when a collision is inevitable to reduce the violence of impact. Some recognize pedestrians, others can only detect vehicles. Systems that will spot large animals like deer are also in the works.
Each automaker has its own software engineers, its own level of hardware and its own idea of what the system should do. That leads to a vast difference in how automatic braking systems work.
In a recent demonstration of the 2016 Toyota Prius pedestrian-detection braking, I saw one journalist after another mow down a dummy named Elvis, despite the fact the system was working as designed.
That’s because Toyota engineers instructed the system to defer to driver input. The sensors apply the brakes automatically, but if the driver then notices the impending collision and hits the brake, the driver’s input overrules the computer’s braking. Most of the journalists testing the system who hit the brake did it with less force than the automatic system was using to save the dummy. The result: flying Elvises. It would have been better to let the automatic brakes do all the work, but the drivers did not understand that.
At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve heard auto writers complain about false positives that caused the Honda Pilot’s system to apply the brakes when they weren’t needed.
Both cases show that the way each automaker engineers its system will be vital.
There will be some dissatisfaction among customers, IHS Automotive senior analyst Stephanie Brinley says. Customer education will be very important. If the driver doesn’t understand and follow the rules that determine how the system works, it won’t.