Automotive safety technology might save your life… but it might not save you much money on your car insurance, study finds

Photo: FCA Media website.

Research organizations such as the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety are now compiling evidence that automotive technology features like blind-spot monitoring and lane departure alerts are proving effective in preventing accidents, as reported in the Insurance Journal and elsewhere.

Vintage car with no Bluetooth? Amazon’s new Echo Auto could be a good solution.

Photo: Tiffany Bailey (Wikimedia Commons).

Amazon announced a new device last week that could expand smartphone connectivity options to those of us who drive older cars that haven’t been upgraded with aftermarket stereos featuring all the fancy-schmancy Bluetooth technology.

As long as your car stereo has a 3.5mm auxiliary input, you’ll be able to plug in the new Amazon Echo Auto, which can then connect to your smartphone through the Alexa app, enabling you to use Alexa voice commands to access features available through your existing phone plan, such as music, navigation, and hands-free calling.

‘Off-road cruise control?’ Ford’s new Trail Control feature for the F-150 Raptor actually sounds like a good idea—but maybe they should position it a little differently

Photo: Ford Media Center.

By Bill Hayward

If you’re like me, you use cruise control as a means of restraint in higher-speed situations, to try to keep the velocity a little lower and decrease the odds of your driving pleasure being interrupted by red-and-blue lights when you’re on a long roadtrip in your favorite silky-smooth, miles-devouring highway cruiser.

Fear the pinch: The market for technology to keep us safe from the hazards of automotive power windows is growing 10 percent per year, report says.

Infographic: Technavio.

If you’re like me, you sometimes feel a little ambivalent about all the technology that, while convenient and helpful in many ways, can make our automobiles so bleepin’ complex these days. Not to mention that truism that has been long-uttered by those resistant to change that every additional accessory or tech feature in a car is just another thing that can break.

So which U.S. automaker might be getting ready to make motorcycles with enhanced location-based services?

Dodge Tomahawk concept motorcycle. Photo: Elambeth (posted to
Wikimedia Commons).

Yesterday, a technology company called Comtech Telecommunications Corp issued a press release boasting about a new $1.9 million contract with a leading U.S. automotive manufacturer to develop a new navigation product.

What was odd about the press release is that the U.S. automaker involved was not named. But the press release did tease one tidbit: it said that the manufacturer will use Comtech’s navigation product “for two of its top vehicle programs, including motorcycles.”

Connected-vehicle tech company Autotalks scores a reported ‘several million dollar’ investment from Hyundai.

Photo: Hyundai media center.

In April we ran a story on Autotalks, an Israel-based semiconductor company focused on the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications technology space, after they announced a collaboration with the Connected Motorcycle Consortium to enhance safety-related communication between motorcycles and other vehicles with which they share the roads.

Yesterday, Autotalks revealed that they have embarked on a major new collaboration—this time with a major global automaker. Through a direct investment in Autotalks, Hyundai Motor Company seeks to drive chipset technology for connected cars into its next generation.

Does size matter when it comes to safety? MINI Hardtop 2 Door bags IIHS safety award for criteria that include ‘nearly avoiding’ a collision, BMW Group says.

Photo: BMW Group media website.

When it comes to factors that affect crashworthiness as well as lighting and driver assist technologies, size might not matter so much. The 2019 MINI Hardtop 2-Door, which weighs in at 2,690 pounds with automatic transmission and sports a wheelbase of 98.2 inches, just brought home a 2018 Top Safety Pick award from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

Drivers of new Cadillacs will soon be able to say, ‘Look, Ma—no hands!’

Photo: GM media website.

Soon, when your baby drives off in a brand new Cadillac, he or she might not even have hands on the wheel. Cadillac announced plans yesterday to roll out Super Cruise, a hands-free driver assistance feature designed for use in highway driving, throughout their entire lineup beginning in 2020.

To sell the new Focus lineup, Ford is asking Europeans to talk to a sign.

Photo: Ford Media Center.

Although Ford announced in April that that they will discontinue U.S. sales of all of the Focus lineup except the Focus Active crossover, the situation is different across the pond in Europe, where Ford began pitching an "all-new" lineup of four flavors of Focus this spring. 

Photo: Ford Media Center.

Now, imagine the conversation around the conference room table as the marketing campaign to support the European launch of the lineup, which includes the Focus ST, the Focus Vignale, the Focus Titanium, and the Focus Active, was under discussion. Did some marketing guru actually say, "Hey, let's have people talk to a sign outdoors?"

Yeah.  Of course. That sounds like a great way to sell a car. 

A (partially, I hope) driverless future: here is what intrigues me.

Self-driving Chevy Bolt. Photo: GM Corporate Newsroom.

Not long after we published our post yesterday on what the “money trails” of the automotive and financial industries are telling us about the future of autonomous vehicles, an ad for a curious book showed up in my feed: The Big Data Opportunity in Our Driverless Future, by Evangelos Simoudis, PhD, a former IBM executive known for expertise in big-data strategies and corporate innovation.

BMW launches wireless plug-in hybrid charging for German market, with other regions soon to follow.

Photo: BMW Group PressClub Global.

The BMW Group announced today that a touchless charging station is now available as a lease option in Germany for the BMW 530e iPerformance plug-in hybrid. According to BMW, the launch in Germany will be followed by offerings in the UK, the US, Japan and China.

New Toyota Research Facility to Test Automated Driving Scenarios 'Too Dangerous for Public Roads'

Photo: Toyota media website.

Toyota revealed Thursday that one of the automaker's research and development divisions, the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), is building a new, closed-course testing site to support the development of automated vehicle technology. The facility, to be built on an approximately 60-acre tract at the Michigan Technical Resource Park in Ottawa Lake, will have the purpose of testing driving scenarios that are "too dangerous to perform on public roads," according to Toyota.

Autonomous Vehicles and Smart Highways: Author Bennecke's Fictional Vision Sorts Out the Worst—And Best—Possible Futures

Especially after a wave of tragic incidents, opinions of self-driving cars and other automated transportation technologies are, to say the least, ambivalent.

This holds true not only at the U.S. level, but also globally. According to survey findings from BCG and the World Economic Forum, as summarized by Statista,  half of survey participants from ten countries say they would not feel safe in a self-driving car. Forty-five percent said, further, that they want to be in control at all times when driving.

The ambivalence at the individual and societal level is affecting creative works as well. And Civil Terror: Gridlock (Jaytech Publishing, March 2018), the first installment in a new series of novels by civil engineer turned fiction author J. Luke Bennecke, is one of the latest examples.


What if traffic jams were not only a nuisance but also an actual source of danger?

With self-driving cars being tested across the world and computer systems at the helm, this possibility is not as far-fetched as it might have once seemed. Bennecke uses his wealth of knowledge on the subject to take a fictional dive head first into the question of what might happen if we, as a society, fail to account for the risks associated with the technological advancements of autonomous vehicles in his new novel.

Kicking off what will eventually be a four-book series, Civil Terror: Gridlock centers on Civil Engineer Jake Bendel. Far from the usual genre hero, Bendel works for the federal government where he has designed and implemented a national self-driving network. For three months fatal accidents and traffic congestion across the U.S. become all but obsolete.

But when a terrorist cell weaponizes Jake’s system, suddenly the technology that was his success story is putting many lives on the line. Bendel and his unlikely partner, a rogue FBI agent named Jose Cavanaugh, must play a deadly game of strategy with a terrorist organization to try and head them off at the pass. When the terrorists’ activities threaten the life of Bendel’s adult daughter, the game becomes even more serpentine, and he must make an impossible decision to save her life or save millions of American lives at risk on freeways everywhere.

"Alexa, Warm Up My Car": Kia Adds Amazon Alexa Remote Voice Controls to Several Models

Kia Optima Hybrid. Photo: Kia media website.

If you've been waiting anxiously to be able to control your Kia from an Alexa-powered Amazon device, your moment has arrived.

Kia Motors America announced on Monday that they have added the ability to remotely control a number of functions, such as starting and stopping the engine or heating and cooling car interiors, using simple voice commands.

The new features are enhancements of Kia's UVO Skill system, UVO being an acronym for "Your Voice." UVO Skill also allows owners to lock doors, sound the horn and flash the lights, and start and stop charging a Kia plug-in or electric vehicle.

Mazda Scores Innovation Award for SKYACTIVE-X Compression-Ignition Engine

From our perspective, there are two key ways that Mazda is strongly distinguishing itself within the automotive today's automotive industry

The first is car model design aesthetics. In a world where you increasingly need to play "find the badge" to identify the manufacturer of that latest boring crossover or lookalike Sonata- or Fusion-shaped fastback sedan, Mazda takes the intractable reality of the aerodynamic and safety-driven basic shapes that the industry feels obligated to produce today and manages to produce standout designs that are stunning enough to make a car enthusiast drool.

Mazda is also pushing the edges outward on the technology and research-and-development side. To name just a few examples, Mazda has made automotive technology news recently with a partnership with Denso and Toyota for electric vehicle R&D, an effort to obsolete the lead-acid starter battery with a lithium-ion replacement, and their latest public triumph: a Gold Edison Award for the SKYACTIV-X compression-ignition engine. 

Get Ready to Say Buh-Bye to That Lead-Acid Battery in Your Car—if Mazda Has Their Way

Photo: Towel401 (Wikimedia commons).

Mazda Motor Corporation, ELIIY Power Co., Ltd. and Ube Industries, Ltd. have agreed to jointly develop lithium-ion batteries for use in automobiles. The three companies will work together to develop durable, heat- and impact-resistant 12-Volt lithium-ion batteries as a viable replacement for lead-acid starter batteries in motor vehicles by 2021.

Lithium-ion batteries offer a promising alternative to conventional lead-acid car batteries, as environmental regulations in some regions restrict the use of lead and engineers aim to reduce vehicle weight for improved fuel economy. But their application in motor vehicles so far has been limited due to the need for car batteries to withstand the high temperatures of the engine room and the potential impact forces of a collision. With this new project, Mazda, ELIIY Power and Ube Industries will combine their technical strengths to overcome such issues.