Daily Archives: January 15, 2015


Mr

Abuelsamid (that would be me) called Mercedes’ seating vision “pretty pie-in-the-sky for the foreseeable future, meaning the next 10 years.”

Let me a share a little more context of what I told +Jim Motavalli when we spoke about this since his word count was limited for the news paper.

First, an important aspect of protecting occupants involves keeping them in position so airbags can do their job. That's why more and more cars have knee airbags, so the passenger or driver don't submarine and the frontal bag can work effectively. If the seats can swivel around to any arbitrary position protecting occupants will be nearly impossible. Someday when all vehicles are autonomous and can't crash, this may be viable but until that time which is likely decades away, this ain't happening. 

Second, until we have a sufficiently high degree of confidence that the sensing and actuation systems will always work and these vehicles can drive themselves properly under all conditions, drivers will need to remain in position, paying attention to what is happening and ready to take over at any time. This will also preclude these fancy swivelling seats. 

I'm not a luddite, I want this stuff to come to fruition for a number of reasons, but I am a realist and understand how extraordinarily hard the problems are that engineers are trying to resolve. ?

Automakers Rethink Seats for Self-Driving Cars – NYTimes.com
As envisioned by some companies, self-driving cars will have front seats that can face each other so occupants, even the person in the driver’s seat, can chat face to face.

Post imported by Google+Blog for WordPress.


*This past Monday +Chevrolet unveiled the second-gen Volt at #NAIAS2015 * #TBT  After I first wrote…

*This past Monday +Chevrolet unveiled the second-gen Volt at #NAIAS2015 *

#TBT  After I first wrote about the original concept eight years ago this week, I followed the car all the way to production. Along the way, in November 2009, I was fortunate enough to be among the first group other than GM engineers to get behind the wheel of the Volt with chief engineer Andrew Farah riding shotgun.
http://www.autoblog.com/2009/11/30/2011-chevrolet-volt-quick-spin/?


*This past Monday +Chevrolet unveiled the second-gen Volt at #NAIAS2015 *

*This past Monday +Chevrolet unveiled the second-gen Volt at #NAIAS2015 *

#TBT  After I first wrote about the original concept eight years ago this week, I followed the car all the way to production. Along the way, in November 2009, I was fortunate enough to be among the first group other than GM engineers to get behind the wheel of the Volt with chief engineer Andrew Farah riding shotgun.
http://www.autoblog.com/2009/11/30/2011-chevrolet-volt-quick-spin/?

Post imported by Google+Blog for WordPress.