I'm Saved; Are You?

I'm glad, but not proud, to admit that PCS (automatic emergency braking) may saved me this morning on the way to work!

Well, possibly prevented a collision, I mean... Slow speed at the time; certainly no chance of death or even minor injury. Plenty of chance for expensive damage though!

The usual bit: I got distracted and looked down for barely even a second, "beep beep beep!", the P.Prime and I both hit the brakes, no accident.

Thinking back though, I can't rule out the possibility that I wouldn't have caught it if PCS hadn't warned me. If so, it would have been my first at-fault accident in ~40 years of driving!

So, I'll be getting back to basics in the near future: Watching my following distance, avoiding distractions, etc.!


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Therein lies the danger, yes. Ultimately, the solution is to get people out of the equation altogether. We're not there yet, but getting closer, and doing so faster than many realize.

The next big step is probably V2V and V2I (vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication).

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For a short time, I worked with a research team at Rice University, understanding the security and privacy issues of V2V and V2I.


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That was quite interesting; thanks! These authors might be overly concerned with the details of the underlying, lower-layer communication network (perhaps implemented as internet protocol), as opposed to the higher-layer communication, where the real value is.

For 22-23 years, before about a year and a half ago, I worked for Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola Semiconductor), toward the end, primarily writing software models of chips we supplied into the Automotive Industry. I also helped manage University Research projects we sponsored, which is where I worked with the Rice-University team.

For the modeling though, I was primarily modeling the microprocessor-portions of those chips, but Freescale eventually gave up on creating those particular microprocessor cores, instead using cores by ARM, so decided to work for ARM now!

Anyway, the week I left Freescale, they had just been bought out by NXP (formerly Philips Semiconductor). Almost a year later, I heard that Qualcomm is planning to buy NXP. Their goal, I'm told at least, is to develop V2V and V2I. It wouldn't surprise me if Qualcomm wants to take the cellular-based approach mentioned in this article, but I obviously don't know, personally.

I'd imagine that big disadvantages of the cellular approach would be that cellular infrastructure is not ubiquitous (e.g., small, rural towns or open roads might have limited-to-no, or low-bandwidth, coverage), and it's still fragmented (oh, your car is on Sprint? Mine is on AT&T; too bad they couldn't communicate to avoid this accident!), it's not great in terms of latency for time-sensitive communications, and of course changing vastly faster than people buy new cars (5G comes out and in 6 years your LTE-based V2V is no longer functional?)


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As a worthwhile footnote, as I recall, PCS only works down to a speed of 7MPH. In short, bear in mind to be **even more vigilant** at very-slow speed.


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As I recall, the Toyota video on YouTube said that PCS turns off below ~7MPH.

Ah, this is a slightly different video from the one I saw earlier, and at about 0:35 says 10KPH (closer to 6MPH):

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The video describes PCS which is a radar-based system. The detectors for objects very close to the vehicle uses those little round ultrasonic sensors around the bottom edge of the car.

Other than the warning beeps you described, they also do robopark and the rear cross-traffic alert.


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I can think of one aspect of the P.Prime's design that could have been better in avoiding distraction:

As I recall, I was switching audio sources when this occurred. From now on, I'll wait until I'm stopped before do such a thing. Nevertheless, the fact that audio and climate controls swipe up from the bottom of the screen puts my eyes farther down from my view of the road than if those features swiped down from the top of the screen.