Forewarned: Not
many cars receive
V2X signals yet, but
some 300+ million
users of mapping
apps could easily
be warned of a
wrong-way driver.24 MOTORTREND.COM MAY 2020W
hat’s a life worth? The answer probably
depends on the life in question. Young or
old? Related to me or not? Well relax, this
isn’t another robocar-chooses-nuns-or-baby-
carriage treatise. It’s a tale of two technolo-
gies aimed at saving 300 to 400 lives per year—but at
dramatically different costs.
The first is the reverse camera, which became manda-
tory as of May 1, 2018. An NHTSA study published just
before Congress enacted the Cameron Gulbransen Kids
Transportation Safety Act mandating a 10-year phase-
in of reverse cameras determined the average annual
fatality rate for back-over accidents in all passenger
vehicles was 362, noting that 44 percent of these were
children under age 5.
A 2017 NHTSA study tallying the cost-per-
vehicle of various safety systems pegged the
cost of backup cameras at $27.19 per car and
$38.53 per light truck. The back-over deaths
haven’t dropped to zero, but let’s pretend they
did. Multiplying those dollar-cost figures by
total car and light truck sales for 2019 results
in an annual cost to society that tops a half-
billion dollars. That divides out to $1.6 million per life.
Totally worth it if it’s your kiddo or one destined to cure
a future cancer you’ll suffer, but it’s undeniably pricey.
A similar annual death rate applies to wrong-way-
driver accidents on divided highways—295 crashes
resulting in 389 deaths according to NTSB and Institute
of Transportation Engineers analysis of 2004–2017 data
pulled from NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis
Reporting System (FARS) database.
These wrecks are usually catastrophic
and happen mostly at night, with 75
percent involving alcohol and 31 percent
occurring between midnight and 3 a.m.,
right after the bars close.
Continental is working to develop
a wrong-way-driver warning system
using automotive-grade radar sensors,
computing chips, and telematics equipment that all runs
at low voltage with modest power demands that a small
solar array should be able to provide.
The whole works would be compact enough to mount
to existing exit ramp sign poles. Long- and short-range
radar units are used, the former featuring a 20-degree
field of view and 820-foot range as required by adaptive
cruise/emergency braking systems. The latter boasts a
150-degree field of view and 330-foot range as required
for blind-spot/rear cross-traffic alert systems.
These devices sense traffic on the off-ramp and in the
adjacent lanes of travel. (Six-lane highways may needadditional radar units.) The sensors inform a chip on the
pole that assesses each object’s size, speed, and direc-
tion of travel, ruling out animals, pedestrians, bicyclists,
or vehicles slowly reversing to a missed exit. The chip
then communicates this info to the cloud via cellular
or DSRC communication, where a “heat map” of traffic
is generated so that temporary lane closures involving
opposite-direction traffic don’t cause false alarms.
When a vehicle is detected entering the highway via
an off-ramp or driving the wrong way down the regular
lanes of traffic, an alert is sent out to the immediate
area (probably a 5-mile radius) via telematics. Such
messages will be received in the newest vehicles by
V2X communications receivers that are just beginning
to roll out, but they can also be transmitted
via smartphone apps like Waze or Google
Maps, and it’s conceivable that a system like
the one used to transmit Amber Alerts could
be narrowly focused on phone users in the
immediate vicinity of a wrong-way driver.
Continental quotes OpenStreetMap data
suggesting there are about 58,000 exit ramps
in the U.S. Multiplying that number by a
targeted system cost of $1,000 per exit ramp yields a
number that’s almost exactly one-tenth our annual
spend on backup cameras, or about $147,000 per life for
the first year. But this infrastructure will last for years,
dramatically lowering the per-life costs over time. As
that’s cheaper than a DUI ticket, if Congress won’t fund
this bargain lifesaver, maybe drunks should. QContinental’s cheap solution
to wrong-way-driver crashes
Frank Markus
NEWS I OPINION I GOSSIP I STUFFTechnologue