Word: smartway
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...various forms, preoccupied the automotive industry for decades. The basic idea is always the same. Proponents imagine a morning someday in the next century when you and your smart car pull out of the garage, drive down local roads in the conventional manner and head for the "smartway." There you will merge into the auto lanes, activate your robo-driver and relax. The car will hurtle along at high speed--perhaps up to 140 m.p.h.--only a few feet from the cars in front and behind but protected by collision-avoidance radar and automatic brakes, with guidance coils on either...
...scheduled to make a test run next year on a modified stretch of I-15 outside San Diego. Five leading Japanese automakers, meanwhile, are members of a government-led consortium that turned a four-mile stretch of new expressway near the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics into a smartway proving ground...
What happens when a deer jumps onto the smartway? What if a driver in the auto lane decides to step on the brakes? What if a computer crashes? Do all the cars follow suit? And then whom do you sue--the driver, the carmaker or the programmer? "With all that can go wrong," asked Chrysler chairman Robert Eaton in a speech in Dearborn, Michigan, last week, expressing some of the industry's concerns, "will we all spend the rest of our lives in court...
...test drivers," he warns me, just as, on cue, the Jeep slams to a halt, throwing us painfully against our seat belts. "Oops," Zyburt says sheepishly. He has accidentally bumped into the system-override "kill'' button set in the back seat. If this had been a real smartway, we might have found ourselves at the business end of a multicar pileup...
Chrysler, for one, seems to have accepted the technology's limitations. Their smartway prototype--with a wire embedded in each lane to give the cars a reference point--is intended only as a test bed for putting the bodies and chassis of new cars through their paces. Chrysler figures the track can cut the time it takes to simulate the punishment the average car undergoes in 100,000 miles from six weeks to two. For the foreseeable future, however, the company doesn't plan to transfer its technology from the lab to the open road. "This stuff is not ready...
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