Mercedes cars with eyes: Dumbed down driving?

You can now buy a Mercedes car that uses a camera to spot speed restriction signs, no-overtaking zones and no-entry signs and then reminds the driver of their whereabouts.

It’s hard to know whether this new technology is a genuinely useful contribution towards road safety that will eventually trickle down to the less expensive cars or simply a gizmo that abdicates drivers of a responsibility to be aware of their surroundings.

Buzzers that remind motorists of no-entry signs may be more than a dumbing down of the driving experience – such technology may be stepping in because the road landscape is becoming progressively harder for the driver to interpret.

The proliferation of road signs in recent years has created a visual cacophony that is ugly to behold and hard for drivers to interpret.

While there appears to be increasing support for ‘naked streets’ – road design that sees signs, pedestrian barriers and even kerbs removed to slow traffic to speeds at which intuition and eye contact have a greater effect than road signs – for the time being we are stuck with what we have.

Sign of the times

It was the Romans who pioneered traffic signs in Britain by marking roads every thousand paces with stones called milliaries, but we waited 1,500 years before other types of sign became widely used.

Following the General Turnpike Act 1773 ‘fingerposts’ became more common, but it wasn’t until cycling became popular in the 1880s that thousands of safety signs warning of steeps descents and blind bends were erected by the Cyclists’ Touring Club.

The rest is history and road users in Britain today have to contend with 160 different types of road sign.

How many could you name?

Cars with a mind of their own

Technology capable of helping drivers look out for cyclists on the road is not new, but until now such systems have been available only as an optional extra on new cars. The Mobileye C2-270 uses a dashboard-mounted camera that is as easy to install as a satnav to predict and warn of potential collisions.

“Sorry mate, my car didn’t see you”

Should the system detect that the vehicle is in danger of colliding with another car, motorcycle, cyclist or pedestrian, it alerts the driver via an alarm and dashboard-mounted screen no larger than a sat nav. The alarm also sounds if the driver is drifting out of their lane.

The Mobileye C2-270 is not able to apply the brakes itself, but ‘crash-proof’ systems that can take complete control of a car are already being used on the road.

The ‘Collision Warning with Full Auto Brake’ system was designed to recognise the leg and arm movements of pedestrians, but during testing it was found to successfully detect and react to cyclists who were at risk of being struck by the car.

In such a situation, the driver first gets a flashing light in the windscreen’s head-up display that looks like a brake light in front of the vehicle. This warning is intended to prompt an immediate, intuitive reaction from the driver. Should the driver fail to respond to the warning and the system assesses that a collision is imminent, the car is brought to a complete stop.

Above 12.5 mph, the system will not bring the car to a complete standstill but reduce the speed as much as possible. In most cases, it is able to reduce the collision force by about 75 per cent.