The safety features on today’s cars and light trucks have various ancestries. Some are the products of a long evolution. Others went quickly from an idea to use.
Automotive windshield glass marks its progress in decades, while software that regulates braking components, for example, can be tweaked and fully tested in months.
Glass windshields debuted around 1904. They went from annealed glass like that in the window of a home, which forms dangerous jagged edges when broken, to safer laminated glass in the 1920s. Cellulose lamination was replaced by plastic in the mid-1960s, said Robert Fiedor, senior staff quality control engineer at PPG Industries, Pittsburgh.
“The improved glass prevented penetration of the windshield by a person in an accident,” Fiedor said.
Fiedor said PPG’s Sungate coated windshield, which has been on the market for a few years, improves safety by keeping driver and passengers cooler by rejecting infrared and ultraviolet portions of the solar spectrum.
Cruise control, which maintains a vehicle’s speed without the driver’s foot on the gas, also developed slowly. It has been around since the 1950s. It took until the 1990s to come up with its next generation, adaptive cruise control, which sensors to determine vehicle position and maintain a safe distance from other vehicles.
“In early 1995 Mitsubishi offered adaptive cruise control on some top-end models,” said Nick Ford, product planning manager for TRW, an automotive supplier.
In 1999, Mercedes-Benz launched its S-Class in Europe with radar-based adaptive cruise control, followed by Jaguar.
That was 30 years after Lucas (now a part of TRW) first tested radar on cars, said Ford, in Birmingham, England. This was early research into cruise control. Ford says it was done to explore the problems of tracking other vehicles on the road and of doing automatic distance control, which has become Adaptive Cruise Control. The limitation of this early work was in the size of the radar unit and the relatively limited computing power available at that time.
Advances in computer technology in the last decade made microwave processing from the vehicle-mounted radar efficient and affordable.
“In 1994 we [Lucas and partners] had a concept that was demonstrable,” Ford said. “This could be seen as the real starting point for adaptive cruise control in Europe.”
The system was further refined in the late 1990s, when Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit radar-sensing technology allowed TRW to use three chips to read the radar information.
“It overcomes the complexity of earlier systems,” Ford said.
“Adaptive cruise control is a driver support feature,” he said. “It is not intended to take responsibility for the driver.”
But Ford said it contributes to safety by allowing deceleration to begin sooner than the typical human response time of one to two seconds.
“Therefore, you need much lower braking force” to slow or stop the vehicle, he said.
Other technologies have come to market much faster. Take a braking and traction control system developed for General Motors, which is available after 18 months.
The H2, the first Hummer to be produced under GM ownership and scheduled to arrive this summer, features the Robert Bosch Corp.’s Anti-lock Braking System 5.3 combined with Automatic Brake Differential (ABD) technology.
By tweaking software, the supplier adapted its ABS and ABD hardware to boulder climbing and mud slogging. Development was largely consumed by the natural surface testing Bosch does to its components.
“That might ordinarily be a couple of years,” said Scott Dahl, engineering manager for Bosch in Farmington Hills, Mich., referring to tests that can take two summers and two winters.
When GM decided telematics would be a plus for owners, the automaker, working with Hughes and EDS, put together its OnStar in-vehicle communications in about a year, according to OnStar spokeswoman Geri Lama.
“It was on the drawing board in 1995 and available in 1996,” Lama said. “Initial features included many of the same things available today: air-bag deployment notification, remote door unlock, stolen-vehicle location, routing and a voice-activated cellular phone.”
Remote diagnostics, which allow technicians at another location to pinpoint problems that have disabled a vehicle needed tweaking. The function came on-stream in 1998, she said.
Research and forecasting also can slow development of safety technology. The Delphi Delco bases its decisions on outlook for consumer demand and government requirements.
“We look 10 years out,” said Dan Salmons, product line manager for occupant sensor systems.
In mid-1996, the Indiana-based supplier began the technical development of a passive occupant detection system, or POD, a seat-based weight-sensing system that deploys or suppresses an air bag based on the size and position of the seat occupant. By July 1999, it was a full program that would yield occupant detection systems for the 2001 Jaguar XK series.
“This was a totally new product in a new market,” Salmons said. This kind of a venture typically takes more time than an update of an existing system or product, he said.
“We’ve been in crash sensors since 1986; we probably could have a new sensor ready in 18 months,” Salmons said.
It was a gamble. Salmons said Delphi Delco had less than 20 percent of what wound up in the final product when it began. And he and his team had not worked with a seat supplier, who would be a necessary partner.
“There already were occupant detection systems in use in Europe,” Salmons said. “We looked at what was available then and found it wasn’t complex enough.”
Delphi Delco engineers were able to transform their know-how from the base pressure sensor produced by the company for engines into bladders to detect the positioning of occupants on car seats.
Mercedes showed a car with active camber control, which tilts wheels in turns to improve stability, at the Chicago Auto Show.
“It was developed 12 to 18 months prior to that, and the project is not done yet,” spokesman Fred Heiler said.
It will face production testing, so the total project may stretch into three or four years, he said.
