From GM, A Car That Won't Crash?

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You have to give General Motors Corp. (GM) some credit. Despite its myriad problems, its engineers still come up with some great ideas. The latest: a car that doesn't crash.



O.K., so no car company can guarantee that you'll never crash your ride. But GM is pilot-testing a new vehicle-to-vehicle communications system [V2V] that lets cars "talk" to each other and avoid a wreck by signaling each one's location on the road.



Here's how it works. GM has a pilot program using several Cadillac STS and CTS sedans that are equipped with transponders -- not unlike those used by aircraft -- that send out electronic pulses that are read by other transponders. The transponders tell an onboard computer where the other cars are located.



"GOD-LIKE."

If one car that's driving 10 vehicles ahead stops suddenly, the transponder can see it and warns the driver in its car via vehicle icons in an instrument panel or by vibrating the seat. The car will automatically brake if a collision seems imminent.



The system can detect cars up to a quarter of a mile ahead and sense other cars entering the driver's blind spot, or other vehicles in the lane next to it. "The car becomes God-like," says Robert A. Lutz, GM's vice-chairman for product development. "It can see around corners."



Lutz says a driver could even take a corner blind, and his car would know if there are vehicles around the corner -- though he says he wouldn't advise anyone to make a turn without looking.



The concept is similar to the lane-departure warning systems and adaptive cruise control systems on the market today. Adaptive cruise uses radar sensors to measure the distance to the next car ahead and warns the driver or causes the car to brake if it gets too close. Lane-departure systems, like those Nissan sells in its Infiniti M45 sedan and FX 45 SUV, read the lines on the road and warns the driver if he or she drifts out of lane without signaling.



CHICKEN AND EGG.

Those systems work, Lutz says. But they're expensive and right now are sold mostly by luxury brands like Mercedes (DCX), Lexus (TM), and Cadillac. Each system requires a radar sensor for every direction the car is reading as well as a computer processor for each one.



Lutz says if you could see all of the radiation beams coming from the most advanced cars, "they'd look like a porcupine." GM's V2V system uses a transponder that costs "a couple hundred bucks," Lutz says. Cars could be equipped to see and avoid colliding with each other pretty cheaply.



V2V has a chicken-and-egg problem, however. Cars can communicate only with other cars that are equipped with transponders. Lutz says to make the system truly effective, every car would have to be retrofitted. It's cheap enough to do, but government regulation may be required to make that happen.



PILOT STAGE.

All these technologies -- GM's V2V system and the other crash-avoidance devices -- are so new that there's no movement to regulate it into widespread use. Safety hawks in Washington like the new technologies, but the jury is out when it comes to measuring how well they work, according to Steve Oesch of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a safety lobby group. "There aren't enough cars with the technology on the road, so the challenge we face is how to monitor the effectiveness of it," he says



Still, industry execs insist that accident-avoidance technology is the next big thing in car safety. "We used to accept that an accident was unavoidable, and we'd engineer the car to protect drivers and passengers," says BMW North American President Tom Purves. "Now we don't have to accept that."



GM may have found the best solution so far for cutting down highway accidents. But getting its car that won't crash from the pilot stage to America's highways may be even tougher than perfecting the technology.