Ford Test Wireless Brake Light Warning System

Researchers at Ford Motor Co.'s European Research Centre in Aachen, Germany, have developed an early-warning brake alert that wirelessly signals to trailing vehicles that a car's brakes are on.

The system illuminates a warning lamp in the following vehicles. The technology can warn drivers of braking vehicles ahead that may be blocked from view by such obstacles as a hill crest, curve in the road or fog bank.

Ford has been testing the system in Frankfurt with a fleet of 20 specially equipped S-Max MPVs under a four-year industry research effort into highway safety technologies called sim^TD (Safe Intelligent Mobility Testfield Germany).

Participants in other Sim^TD projects include Audi, BMW, Daimler, Opel, Volkswagen, Bosch, Continental, Deutsche Telekom and several German research institutions and government agencies.

The $70 million sim^TD project evaluated 20 emerging technologies with a fleet of 120 vehicles that spent 41,000 hours and covered 1 million miles of public roads and test tracks. Field tests ended last December.

Among the other car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure technologies evaluated were obstacle warning, traffic management and in-car Internet-based services such as parking space finders and current images from traffic cameras.

Test cars were linked to each other and a central data center with on-board and roadside systems using a standard wireless LAN.

Sim^TD says results prove the feasibility of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure systems. The group estimates that widespread implementation of such technologies could save Europe more than $15 billion per year by reducing the economic cost of accidents and environmental pollution.