New Drowsy Driver Alert Technology
A hearty well done to Mercedes Benz for the new E-Class cars. They have carefully studied and developed a system that alerts drivers that have dozed off. According to AutoWeek.com:
Mercedes, which has been working on the system for more than 10 years, accelerated its development and will reveal it at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit next month.
Mercedes claims its system is an independent judge of fatigue, constantly monitoring a driver’s behavior to send warning chimes and flare a coffee-cup sign when it senses a serious drop-off in alertness levels.
“Studies show that after just four hours of driving, the risk of an accident doubles,” Mercedes-Benz Attention Assist expert Jorg Breuer said. “It increases eightfold after six hours, and drivers often fail to recognize drowsiness early enough.”
To identify the point when drivers slip from awareness to weariness, engineers fitted almost 600 drivers with brain-wave-monitoring skullcaps. They figured out that there were 70 parameters that would give a better measure of fatigue than proposed camera-based systems. But the key was steering inputs.
This new technology is one all car manufacturers need to put on the fast track. It’s estimated that 1500 drivers die each year due to drowsy driving. The key here and why it’s so important is because it monitors steering, it will alert distracted drivers too. There has been a huge push lately to move for safety legislation to curb distracted drivers. I fully agree with that move. Here though, we have in our hands technology that one can only assume will improve from this point that has the potential for saving thousands of lives each year.
Going through a trauma experience myself where a driver who had fallen asleep crested a hill my friend and I were climbing—in our lane and hit us head on. I was pinned in the vehicle for an hour and a half, so no one has to convince me how important this technology is*.
I’ve also been in a fatal drunk driving accident. I want to be very cautious to not seem to be enabling drunk driving, quite the contrary, I’m very vocal about getting serious about drunk drivers, it’s a problem we can solve if we have the determination to do so. This technology will also help prevent some of the injury and death related to drunk driving as well. Though it’s certain the drunk driver that died in my accident was not asleep, I’m fairly certain that many drunk drivers kill, injure and die themselves because they also fall asleep. Statistics, as it should be, only care about whether alcohol was involved and whether the cause was alcohol.
We fight and fight for things as simple as primary seat belt laws state-by-state. This new technology has potential to prevent thousands of trauma injuries and deaths a year. We can seize the day here and get legislation in gear on a national level to require this technology in every single car manufactured in or sold in the US.
*You can read my story about my surviving trauma here
[…] the question is what does that technology look like? For sure, as stated in our article about Mercedes Benz new drowsy driver alert system would be a logical solution. That takes time though. What we recommend is that the Senate and House […]