Testing anti-collision systems

Transcript

Welcome to this beautiful intersection, North of Montreal in Blainville. This is a Transport Canada facility, and we're here in this mock-up intersection, behind me, to better study how vehicle technology can help and assist in reducing fatalities and injuries on Canadian roads.

Today we are going to carry out two types of tests, and in this case, our vehicle must stop and also provide warnings to the driver.

Why we're doing this, into an intersection that you will see in a city with the lampposts, with other pedestrians standing beside, is to challenge current systems.

We use test dummies, of course, not real models. No, that's right.

We look at vulnerable road users. We have pedestrians, we have cyclists. Earlier, we saw the motorcyclist.

To create the scenarios, we have a lot of specialized equipment which allows as much repeatability as possible. In the vehicle, we have pedal robots to control the speed of the vehicle. We have driving robots to replicate the trajectory in a highly repeatable manner. The driver is just there to monitor that everything is going well, that data is entered in the vehicle.

But if there's ever a braking action, that's really the system. The driver will never touch the brakes because we really want to see how the system reacts.

It's very important to notice that when you use your vehicle with advanced technologies that you have limitation in the owner's manual. These limitations can be affected by the angle of the sun, if it rains, if it snows. It's not a perfect solution. It doesn't work everywhere.

And this is why it's very important to understand that these features should be there as a safety measure, an extra set of eyes that will alert you and help you if there's, for example, pedestrians crossing the road where you least expect it.

This is a test that truly represents what we can encounter in an urban setting, for example, when a child decides to cross at the last second.

That's what is very interesting because it can enable us to better understand the benefit of this type of technology, how it will perform in the real world environment while doing it safely on the test track.

There are so many injuries and deaths occurring at intersections in Canada. We are fortunate to have a great team that will enable us to understand the limitations and operation of driver assistance systems.

On average, 4 pedestrians and 1 cyclist die, and 20 pedestrians and 8 cyclists are severely injured each week.