Feeling a little stone-age behind the wheel? If you’ve only just mastered the art of hooking your iPod up to the car stereo, you might not want to read this list of technologies coming to car users soon – from cars that can talk to each other, to interactive windscreens.
HeadsUp
A small team in Washington, D.C. recently started a funding campaign on Indiegogo to get their prototype windscreen HUD (heads up LCD display), unimaginatively coined HeadsUp, developed. The technology means that your phone or device can screen apps onto a part of your windscreen, a la Google Glass. The premise is promising, but the team behind this model have been quiet since December ’13. Nissan Nismo Nissan have designed a watch that connects wirelessly to your car. Like something out of a Bond film, the device can take accurate readings of your vehicle, which can currently only look at your median speed and average fuel consumption. The Nismo can also read your heart rate but is currently only available to Nissan drivers. Active cornering headlights Active cornering lights are intuitive to your steering and swivel the lamps to light up the parts of the road you need to see more clearly when making a sharp turn. Currently a feature found on some new high-end cars, the technology has proven particularly popular and could see a mainstream assimilation soon. Self-driving cars This one is more one for the future than a strictly ‘new’ technology –but engineers working for Google are known to have already tested the idea of self-driving cars fairly extensively. Though something we’re more used to seeing in sensational entertainment such as Knight Rider, the idea of a self-navigating car seems feasible, even with current technology. Inter-vehicular communication The U.S. government has poured funds into researching a technology that can allow cars to interact with each other on the road – potentially preventing nearly four out of five car accidents, according to research. The in-development technology has been dubbed V2V, vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Of course, there’s always the need for a traditional car stereo among all the high-tech gadgetry, providing a welcome entertainment alternative on very long journeys.