Drive a car decked out with safety-assistance technology and, depending on the maker, it'll buzz, beep, bloop, flash, or even vibrate your butt to signal a warning. But Bosch thinks you also deserve a swift kick in the right foot.
-The German do-it-all purveyor of home appliances, advanced automotive electronics, and more has just introduced the "active gas pedal." It's a natural evolution of modern drive-by-wire accelerators, by which pedals send precise electrical signals to vehicle computers without any physical connection to anything in the engine bay. Here, the Bosch pedal also acts as a receiver, able to communicate what's happening from the transmission, navigation, and all those driver-assist and V2v sensors that eventually will become standard equipment. The result? A pedal that buzzes, taps, and pushes against your right foot to deliver haptic feedback.
-Bosch—which supplies automatic-braking, lane-keeping, and other safety technology to a wide swath of the industry—claims this is a more intuitive way of warning the driver versus the usual lights and chimes since the pedal is shooting alerts through your leg. Collision alerts and excessive speed warnings could be felt as heavy vibrations. Applying counterpressure when the driver exceeds posted speed limits, or to act as a coach to signal when to begin coasting, could encourage more eco-friendly driving. Hybrid drivers might feel a small kick when the gas engine fires up. Even manual-transmission users could get a notification when it's time to let off the accelerator and engage the clutch for maximum efficiency when coming to a stop. The idea, Bosch says, is to give drivers a better sense of traffic surroundings "without having to think too much about it."
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- Nissan's Autonomous Plan: 10 New Cars With Self-Driving Tech by 2020 -
- Toyota Spending $1 Billion on Robotics, Self-Driving Cars with MIT and Stanford -
- Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications Are the Next Big Thing in Auto Safety -
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Right now, the only carmaker we know of that offers a similar pedal today is Infiniti, some of whose models can encourage dainty acceleration by pushing firmly against your right foot when Eco mode is engaged.
-from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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