Hello Peng friends, this is the second installment of our security series, sorry for the delay due to some unexpected circumstances. I had planned on finishing this before the Safety Day but last week, certain areas in Guangzhou were quiet and I did not want to affect my work progress. So, when I received the announcement last Friday at 12 am, I drove and took the high-speed rail from Guangzhou to Shanghai, covering more than 500 kilometers of NGP testing alongside assisted driving mode, which was not tiring at all. NGP is truly an amazing thing! Anyway, let’s get to the topic at hand.
As the most common mode of transport, cars are becoming faster, environmentally friendly, smarter, and safer. However, we all know that early cars were designed to replace horse carriages and were structured similarly. There weren’t many safety measures in place, and in case of collision, the consequences were unimaginable. Legendary racers, back then, often had accidents, which led to fatalities. With the advancement of technology and an increasing emphasis on preserving life, more and more attention has been given to vehicle safety in the design process. High-strength steel usage, energy-absorbing designs, airbags, and seat belts that we often see during car launches, are merely rectification measures, protecting passengers in case of accidents, which is what we call passive safety. Various tests include NCAP and C-NCAP, and Peng Motors has won the highest score of 5 stars as an intelligent car maker.
With the rapid development of intelligent technology, assisted driving has become one of the vehicle’s most critical features. Intelligent engineers have invented numerous features that can help in preventing accidents, nipping them in the bud, and preventing them from happening. This is what we call active safety. However, this field has numerous abbreviations, including FCW, AEB, DOW, BSD, RCW, RCTA, ELK, LKA, TSR, and DSM. Sometimes, even for myself, it takes a moment to understand these abbreviations. Nevertheless, let me try to categorize them. Generally speaking, there are a few types: not colliding with others in the front and rear, avoiding deviation from the road, not overspeeding, avoiding sleep-driving, not opening car doors that may hit others.
The first category, “not colliding with others in the front and rear,” includes AEB, RCW, and RCTA. This means that when you are driving forward or backward, your car can recognize and detect other vehicles at the front or back and can automatically slow down or brake. When reversing, you can “see” other vehicles from the rear and sides and, hence, make it easier for you to avoid collisions. However, there are two limitations that we all need to know:- The first point is that these abilities rely on the vehicle’s perception capabilities. If the sensor cannot “see” something, it cannot protect it. For example, if a camera does not recognize a panda, it cannot protect the bear, and if a millimeter-wave radar mainly perceives moving objects, it is very difficult to deal with static obstacles such as stone lions. You may have been impressed by the abilities of the P5 LCC enhanced version in the recent review of new transportation. It could stop for another car and swerve around, even opening car doors of the parked car ahead. This is partly due to the laser radar, which works wonders with static obstacles. However, laser radar is not omnipotent. For example, it cannot distinguish “soft obstacles”. If the green belt in the middle of a city road grows too wildly, it will also be recognized as an “obstacle”. In fact, we would like to tell everyone that P5 has implemented many safety functions, but no technology is perfect, and you must always pay attention to the road conditions and not be distracted.
- The second point is that active safety needs to be more “active” because advanced driver assistance systems can take over the throttle, brake and steering wheel. People often mistakenly believe that it can completely replace the driver, which is actually a dangerous misconception. Taking the more common AEB as an example, in the European E-NCAP, the test standard is triggered at below 80 km/h, while in China it is below 65 km/h. You may wonder why it doesn’t work at higher speeds. The reason is simple: any sensor’s perception ability will be more inaccurate as the distance gets further away, just like when we use WiFi at home. The farther away we are from the router, the weaker the signal. So just imagine, on a highway, if the “active” braking is too frequent, it will easily cause a rear-end collision. Although technology will continue to iterate and develop, you must also know that “active” safety cannot be too “active”.
- Not deviating from the road and avoiding speeding. It is easy to understand that it can intelligently identify lane markings and remind you when you are off the track, or alert you to speed limits. The P5 also has an intelligent speed limit adjustment function. If set to automatic, it can even adjust the speed limit in the case of LCC and NGP. However, there are two points to note here: lane departure warning does not like bad habits of drivers. If you change lanes without signaling, he will mostly think you are driving off track. The other point is about TSR, which is that the speed limit in some places is very low, such as the ramp, with a regulatory limit of 40, but most people do not usually follow this speed. NGP can correct this, but if you encounter such a situation, you should pay attention and not always insist on following the rules. After all, driving too slow will make the driver behind you impatient.Stay Awake While Driving is DSM. Recently, I was mentioned by my colleague on Weibo because of this function. Its purpose is to remind curious and hungry passengers to pay attention to the road instead of looking around and eating hamburgers or letting go of the steering wheel in the driving process.
Open Doors Without Hitting People is a simple but practical function. With the rampant delivery personnel on the road, the P7 model, for example, can help drivers avoid dangers by monitoring the changes in the ambient light of the car door panel. If there is any danger behind, the ambient light will flash in red as a warning. It is also important to remind passengers, especially children and elderly people, to be cautious.
All of the above are just the visible safety features that we provide. In fact, we have put in more efforts on safety that you may not know:
For example, we are the first car brand to confess our safety shortcomings publicly. By providing safety education videos and tests before enabling certain functions, we remind and emphasize the importance of safety issues to our customers. We do this without excessive publicity.
Another example is that we are currently the only domestic brand that has implemented an intelligent driving safety scoring system. By evaluating the daily driving behavior of customers through our safety scoring system, both drivers and our AI can learn from each other and drive more safely. We highly recommend our customers to enable this feature in our mobile app.
The most important efforts we make are the ones you cannot see. During our 1024 technology sharing event this year, our Chief Scientist shared a data report that after more than a year of cloud data training, the safety level of our P7 and P5 models’ NGP (Navigate on Guidance Pilot) function has increased by ten times compared to before. This data comes from real-life scenarios and will be constantly added to our simulation models and applied to future models, such as the G9 and beyond.
During the development of intelligent driving assistance systems, active safety and intelligent driving assistance features work together. Active safety ensures that the vehicle maintains the minimum safety level, while intelligent driving assistance functions push the boundaries of intelligent driving. Although it requires a huge investment, active safety is the feature that we hope our customers do not have to use. Safety is a serious matter, and all of our efforts are worthwhile.
Lastly, we would like to stress that the higher your vehicle’s computing power and sensor combination, the more advanced your driving assistance features will be. The PRO and MAX versions are excellent in this regard.
That’s the end of the second article. We hope this information has been helpful to you. In the third article, we will discuss how driving assistance will evolve into autonomous driving.We’ll see you next time.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.