AS THE TECHNOLOGY powering our cars continues to evolve at a rapid rate, concepts you might have only seen in futuristic films are now only a few prototypes away from becoming a feature within the vehicle you choose to drive.
From the declining need for a human driver to biometric technology in your seat that senses your levels of stress (and responds accordingly with a massage), cars are quickly getting smarter, safer and a whole lot more slick.
Here are the fascinating new technologies that we’re most excited to try in the not-so-distant future.
Meet SeDriC (a clever derivative of ‘self-driving car’), an electric concept car created by Volkswagen for ‘level five’ of autonomous driving – in other words, it is completely self-driven, with no need for a human driver to sit at the wheel.
It’s operated with just a touch of a button that can be used anywhere to order its arrival, which can be signalled by ringing, coloured signals and vibrations that lead visually impaired users to the car. Designed as a platform for cross-brand ideas, Volkswagen envisage that it will be used to pick up kids, shopping, and drive its owners to work.
Detailed information projected on windscreens was something we once only saw in the cars of Bond villains, but now it’s something that has begun to appear in cars as standard. But the next buzz in dashboard technology is even more futuristic.
Augmented Reality (AR) dashboards will not only display basic information but also be able to identify objects in front of a vehicle and tell the driver how far they are away from the car, overlaying this information so a red box may appear around an object with arrows showing how to avoid it.
We’ve already seen the release of energy-efficient electric cars, but is there room for solar power in the auto industry? In fact, as the prices of solar and electric batteries continues to fall as the cost of fossil fuels rises.
It’s hoped that in the future charging stations can be wired to draw energy from rooftop solar arrays, allowing users to charge their electric cars using only renewable energy. This would likely only be for short, single-charge journeys but research into solar energy continues.
Sometimes find it a little difficult to keep your cool while placed in Friday evening traffic? Engineers have already developed the world’s first health-monitoring car seat, which uses a biometric sensing system built into the seat’s lining to detect drops in energy or spikes in stress.
The best part? When the seat detects a rise in heart or respiration rate, it responds with a specific massage pattern, along with an increase in airflow that emerges through the seat’s ventilation system. We’re certainly hoping that these seats will soon become standard, but they are just in development for now.
Designed to eliminate the excessive costs of road traffic collisions, Europe and Japan are now testing technology that may help to create a car-to-car network. Unlike the current radar and ultrasound technology in today’s cars, this technology would extend far past the potential obstruction.
It is hoped that within the next decade, each car on the road will broadcast its position, speed, steering wheel position, brake status and other valuable data to all vehicles within a hundred-metre radius, building a detailed picture of the driving environment around them, alerting even the most careful and alert drivers to potential dangers.
Just like fingerprint technology, tools that have been made popular on smartphones are set to shape the cars that are designed in the near future. Several car manufacturers are already developing digital assistant projects with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple in what some technology experts have called “the battle of the giants”.
But what do they think that the future of digital assistance will look like? “In the very long play we can see vehicles becoming a real entertainment space – an extension of people’s lounges. The real endgame is we all put our feet up and watch movies, the digital assistant does the driving.” Jack Wetherill, a tech analyst at Futuresource told the BBC recently.
The future of driving is nearer than you think. The new Volkswagen Golf is available with Car-Net App Connect (Apple CarPlay & Android Auto Smartphone Integration), Car-Net Guide & Inform (allowing you to use real-time data from the internet on your Sat-Nav, such as available parking spaces or nearby points of interest) and a suite of Driver Assistance Systems such as Adaptive Cruise Control and Lane Assist (automatically keeps your car in lane). Discover more at Volkswagen.ie.
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