American automaker Ford will be making nighttime driving safer through innovative headlights and camera technologies to better prevent accidents. Driving during the night can become challenging even for the most experienced of drivers.
The contrast of bright city lights and darkness around it could dampen reflexes by unconsciously distracting our eyes’ attention. The problem becomes much, much worse when the lighting is dim or virtually non-existent.
To fix the problem, Ford is working on a new system which would detect potential hazards that might jump out in front of your car during nighttime driving and keep track of road patterns that a driver might miss. The technology will employ two systems, one already familiar in other Ford models, and a second, which is still in its prototype phase.
The first, named “camera-based advanced front lighting” uses GPS, traffic sign recognition and an adapting lighting system that enables the car to detect turns and roundabouts all by itself. Automatically, the headlights instantly widens the beams in order to provide more efficient illumination around the car.
That information is instantly sent to the global positioning system (GPS) so that the software may memorize it for future occurrences.
The second system called “Spot Lighting” technology will be using infrared cameras set in the grille of the car to map out the road ahead. When it encounters an object obstructing its view, an obstacle of any nature, it will automatically turn the headlights onto the target and display a highlighted version on the screen inside the car in yellow or red, depending on the level of danger.
The camera will be able to detect up to eight objects at a time and could prove to be the most useful system to prevent nighttime accidents to date. Dimly-lit roads are the main cause of driving accidents at night, with drivers either missing turns or finding themselves with an animal jumping in front of the car. Or worse.
The new technology is set to lower the fatality rate of nighttime accidents, but it might be a while before the Spot Lighting system will be available on the market.
Image source: carprousa.com