Ducati’s new tech may make crashes a thing of the past
Cutting-edge tech will alert a rider to danger
‘We want to be first with radar systems’ PIERLUIGI ZAMPIERI, DUCATI
For all their talk of wheelies, powerslides and 220bhp on tap, one of Ducati’s biggest goals is safety. As part of their ‘safety roadmap’, which defines their strategy to 2025, the big red are fitting advanced riding aids to every new model, including Cornering ABS for many. In fact, this process is as important as the search for speed. “Increasing performance is what we have done since the beginning, this is nothing new,” says Pierluigi Zampieri, Vehicle Innovation Manager at Ducati. “The other approach to increasing safety was new for us a few years ago. Now we have the same commitment to making our bikes easier and safer as we do to pushing the performance.”
Ducati’s latest innovation comes from the use of twin radar systems to sense what’s happening in the immediate vicinity of the bike. As Tomorrow’s World as this sounds, we could see this on a production bike by the end of the year.
“With the radar systems we are pushing hard to be the first and we should succeed,” explains Zampieri. “We started this investigation with a university in 2014 and we are now trying to be first in the market. We don’t want to be followers.
“At the same time we have cornering ABS, slide control and other vehicle control algorithms to increase safety and performance. If you go back to the 916 days things were totally different, now we are trying to redefine the idea of a bike that can be ridden by everyone. We cannot afford to have a bike that has so much power but can only be ridden by a professional. It would be impossible to sell.” Of course Ducati’s technical innovation isn’t just aimed at speed and safety. Ducati are trying to explore the ways we operate our machines and how they communicate with us. “One of our main investigations right now is the ‘Human Machine Interface’,” adds Zampieri. “We have been putting more and more things into our bikes and they’re becoming more complicated for the user (from an interface point of view). At the end of the day, the user has the eyes and thumbs. You can’t have a big screen like in a car, so we have to look at other sensations. “We have been investigating haptic feedback, acoustic feedback, visual feedback with the helmet, with only the bike, the seat, the jacket, the gloves. We are testing a lot of solutions. “I’m convinced we will have to guarantee a certain base level in the bike (it must be safe by itself) but we will be able to enhance the experience.”