Excuse me sir but that car is getting kind of close…

Vehicle safety is almost a holy grail for car manufacturers. Making vehicles safe while at the same time not taking away from the look of the vehicle can be a difficult challenge. One of the avenues being looked at is referred to as Inter-Vehicle Communication; which is where properly equipped vehicles will be able to share information with each other such as proximity and speed. the idea being that your vehicle would be able to warn you about approaching cars and whether they might pose a danger to you.

With driver safety in mind Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has been working with several of the country’s car makers with different style of interfaces to alert a driver. Of those involved Fuji Heavy Industries (FHI) Ltd and Mitsubishi Motors Corp have employed as system to alert the driver via a dedicated dashboard monitor rather than the navigation screen warnings employed by other manufacturers. the thought here is that the driver will be able to see the warnings with less eye movement making even the display of critical information safer.

With the FHI system, the screen of the dedicated monitor remains a blue color in its normal ‘safe’ mode. When it finds a vehicle approaching and the risk of collision is high the colour changes to yellow. At the same time an icon appears to let the driver know they type of collision that could occur – such as an accident at an intersection or on a right turn.

In addition, vehicles with equipment for inter-vehicle communications are displayed on the car navigation screen. These vehicles are normally indicated as blue triangles. But when there is a high risk of a collision, the color turns to yellow.

“The driver basically looks at the dedicated monitor but can check the location of other vehicles on the car navigation screen,” FHI said.

Source: TechOn

With the Mitsubishi system the dedicated monitor is normally used to indicate a direction towards which the vehicle is travelling. When the system detects a vehicle with equipment for inter-vehicle communication the monitor will display a symbol indicating such detection

When there is a high risk of collision, the monitor displays an icon corresponding to the possible situation, such as a crash at an intersection or a right-turn accident involving a vehicle approaching in the opposite lane. Unlike FHI’s system, the car navigation screen is not used to show vehicles utilizing the inter-vehicle communication system.

“We simplified the system so that the situation can be determined with the use of the dedicated monitor alone because we wanted to make a system independent of a car navigation system,” Mitsubishi said.

Source: TechOn

Here’s some pictures of the test vehicles.

FHI vehicles

Mitsubishi’s offering

Pictures courtesy of TechOn