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Vehicle safety electronics
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SAFETY...
Who cares?BY DAVID WILSON
If you’ve bought a new vehicle recently, you will have noticed that a non-car guy/girl is determining the features list and going all out to rub you out of the Captain and Commander role and relegate you to the backseat.
I was mightily impressed with the Jeep Trailhawk, plenty of 4WD capability and a willing diesel, only blunted by a mildly annoying steering trait.
The camera in the new Isuzu sees all sorts of things, even ghosts!
Irecall back in 2018, when reviewing the Jeep Compass Trailhawk, that it had (compared to today) a pretty basic safety setup for lane-keeping and other duties. Because of it, I thought that maybe there was a problem with the steering box, because every now and then it would bindup, especially when going around a corner. That was my first introduction to lane-keeping vehiclesafety electronics that are generally loved by road-safety legislators and loathed by you and me, the longsuffering car consumers. I’ve been driving Isuzu’s new D-MAX and their new MU-X for two years now and at the time of their release, IDAS, as Isuzu Ute Australia call it (Intelligent Driver Assistance System), was the most technologically advanced suite of safety electronics seen on a motor vehicle in this country. It uses a twin-lens (stereo) camera located up in the windscreen that is constantly on the lookout ahead for peril and left in its most-sensitive settings it finds plenty of it, both real and imagined. One of its party-tricks is scouring the roadspace for lane markings, white lines that might define where you need to be. My first encounter of new D-MAX’s corrective steering was on a wet August day out in the backblocks after rain had left a heap of puddles in the craggy bitumen’s unmarked left edge. IDAS saw that as the 'white line' and my left-hand margin, forcing me out to the centre of the road where it saw the mid-road marking. What ensued
was a bizarre couple of kilometres of being bounced around like the ball in a pinball machine, as the flippers (IDAS) had a bout of histrionics. It seems I wasn’t the only one to have experienced something similar and the crescendo of unpopular opinion resulted in Isuzu offering up a 'fix' a year later, with a steering wheel button depression that disables the lane-keeping function, winning back more driver control.
Hang on, we’ve just turned off a key component in a technology that the automotive safety-Nannas reckon is the Holy Grail and mandatory in every new vehicle design? Talk about conflicted. Of course Isuzu aren’t alone in this caper and EVERY new 4WD and passenger car sold in this country and elsewhere, use similar systems designed by Bosch, ZF, Denso and Hitachi. It’s reasonable to expect too, that all these systems, whether employed in a Toyota, Ford, Nissan, Mitsubishi or Mazda, or LDV, are likely to be as intrusive as the Isuzu setup, maybe even more so? A case in point. In the last few weeks I’ve been swanning around in a new Toyota LandCruiser 300, the VX version, and costing around the $120K mark, including on-roads. It too has its own version of IDAS, but luckily for me the previous journalist driving it had managed to set its parameters at the low end of the scale and it was bearable, but the conversation I had with a mate who bought a 300 GR Sport recently was typical of a first-time user on a current Toyota 4WD.
In Ian’s words, “This would have to be the most dangerous car I’ve ever driven, steering me into oncoming traffic and applying the brakes in the middle of the road, in traffic, for no reason. It’s crap”. He went on, “If this is the best Toyota can do, I’m taking it back and they can stick it where …” and I think you get the rest of where that yarn was going. Now, Ian isn’t a dumb bunny, because his garage is filled with high-end and pretty diverse machinery, like a McLaren, Mercedes G-Wagen and an AMG GT, a Porsche or two, a new Defender, a couple of Ranger Raptors and chuckle, a JB74 Jimny. All of them possessed their own iteration of the safety electronics, but he was mightily pissed with his LandCruiser, because it offered the most-burdensome version.
This magic button turns off most of the D-MAX and MU-X lane-keeping hysteria and is the automotive equivalent of Valium. New LandCruiser 300 is another one blighted by an overly attentive set of safety initiatives that needs some taming.
Luckily Toyota fiddled with his car’s brain and stopped the histrionics before they totally lost a previously loyal customer. That begs the question then. If we are frustrated with the performance on-road of these systems and increasingly they are making 4WDs almost impossible to drive off-road, and add so much complexity to a vehicle and therefore cost, why have we allowed this to happen?
You’ve all read about, or experienced, the lengthy wait-times for new vehicles and a lot of that is locked up in this discussion, the need for ever-increasingly more powerful computer processing that’s just not made in sufficient numbers, in this era of recorddemand for new vehicles. In the case of an LC300, that means forecasted wait times being anywhere between one to four years (depending on country), sheesh! And then there’s the cost. I’ve done a bit of a consult with some automotive tech-folk and asked what the pure cost of these safety systems might be, and there’s a thought it might be adding anywhere between $5-15K, depending on the vehicle in question, the hardware required and the licensing and upkeep of the software installed. It all begs the question about longevity as well? Will this stuff only increase the disposable nature of the automotive world and in ten year's time there’ll be zero support, rendering today’s cars undriveable, when inevitably things start going wrong? To the scrapheap they go with random electrical faults and prohibitively expensive to repair. Somewhere in Europe there’s a cabal of safety-zealots who are plotting the overthrow of the automobile world as we know it. They’ve never enjoyed the pleasure of shifting gears, or anticipating a braking moment. They’ve never engaged LOW range, instinctively adjusted traction or been bogged. What we’re witnessing is the devolution of 4WD design, with too much emphasis on risk-aversion. Safety … who cares?
It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to turn off the 'aids' on a new vehicle. You just can’t escape their reach, on or off-road.
Yep, that’s my D-MAX and right, royally bogged, thanks to traction control that despite being turned off, re-emerges once you get over 40km/h.
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