Best laid plans
Adaptive cruise control maintains a safe distance between vehicles on the highway by automatically accelerating or slowing down without the driver’s help, while lane-keeping-assist technology helps drivers stay in their lane by gently tugging the wheel when the car starts to drift. Great ideas. But they also lull drivers into letting their guard down, which puts them at greater risk of crashing, according to a recent study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. The study underscores the depths of the safety challenges faced by the auto industry as it continues its transition from traditional vehicles to self-driving cars.
Night rider
Is your night vision dimming just a little? The Lanmodo Color Night Vision Camera system is a 8.2-inch screen that uses light amplification to give a visual range of about two football fields ahead, according to a report in The New York Times. The camera lens needs a view of the pavement, of course. It’s $500 on Amazon, and a coupon drops it by $100.
Tired of mainstream music?
Is your Internet radio station sounding too mainstream? Pandora’s “Modes” feature fixes that by letting you fine-tune the song selection, reports Fast Company. You can play the hits, focus on deep cuts, or emphasize discovering similar artists, and with a Pandora Premium subscription, you can limit stations to a single artist as well. It’s not an entirely new idea – the oft-forgotten Slacker Radio has offered fine-tuning for years. But it’s one that should be available on every music service.
Vehicle-to-vehicle communication
German auto giant Volkswagen unveiled the latest generation of its Golf compact passenger car, whose new features includes Car2X, a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication technology. Car2X uses WLANp, a communication standard similar to Wi-Fi, to allow vehicles to communicate information between other vehicles and their environment. The technology will enable eligible Golf models to communicate road hazards or incidents with other Car2X-enabled vehicles or sensors within half a mile. VW isn’t the first to implement inter-vehicle communication. But by deploying Car2X technology in the Golf, VW is likely attempting to build its case for making Car2X the preferred standard of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication.
Driving on weed
A survey released last fall by Abbott shows almost two-thirds of Americans (64%) are concerned about an increase in drugged driving crashes as more states legalize recreational marijuana. These findings echo data collected in AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety survey in which respondents in both AAA and Abbott’s surveys showed that overwhelmingly (70% and 92%, respectively) people feel it’s dangerous to drive within an hour after ingesting marijuana. And Abbott’s interest? The company says its SoToxa™ handheld device – formerly known as the Alere DDS®2 Mobile Test System – can analyze a subject’s oral fluid to quickly determine if they have recently taken drugs, including amphetamine, benzodiazepines, cannabis, cocaine, methamphetamine and opiates.
Drive-thru dining
Select BMW owners can now order Nekter Juice Bar and Portillo’s from their cars with the push of a button, part of a test conducted by food ordering platform Olo. Eligible customers can order, and are then given driving directions to pick up their food, reports Restaurant Business Online. Consumers can log on to the BMW Labs website to check their eligibility and preconfigure an order. The service allows drivers to order favorites and repeat orders. The move is the latest in tech-enabled ordering from chain restaurants. Chipotle recently announced that customers can order via Amazon’s voice-enabled Alexa devices. And Wingstop announced a partnership with online-gaming site Twitch that lets players and streaming-video watchers place an order.