Year after year millions of drivers pull onto US roads for long road trips. Respectively more than 100,000 crashes are caused yearly from extreme fatigue while driving with an excess of 1,500 annual deaths. It only takes but a split second of sleep for one driver potentially to end the lives of every passenger in the vehicle. In an effort to fight extreme fatigue on the roads Mercedes has jumped to the front line in developing a standard “drowsy-driver” detection system that will be installed in the 2009 series E-class sedan.
The system is designed to measure the certain awareness of the driver and alert him via a special lighted coffee cup sign and high pitched warning sound chimes. The special measurements come from accurate steering sensors; Mercedes brainstormed more than 70 different ways of measuring fatigue including camera systems but finally decided that accurate steering sensors were the way to go.
Jorg Breuer, Mercedes Benz Attention Assist Expert said, “Studies show that after just four hours of driving, the risk of an accident doubles, and it increases eightfold after six hours. Drivers often fail to recognize drowsiness early enough.” Breuer commented that the fatigue system “is also sensitive to distracted drivers who are on the cell phone or talking to the kids in the back seat. They will get a warning, too; and since the effects of alcohol are very, very similar to the effects of drowsy driving, we would assume it would work for that, too.”
In order to find the exact position where drivers slip from being aware to being exhausted, scientific engineers cataloged a consensus which was made up of nearly 600 automotive drivers who were then required to wear a brain-wave monitoring skullcap that was specifically designed to measure exhaustion brain-waves.
Mercedes itself has been working and priming the system for more than 10 years and finally decided to bump production to move much faster so that the company will be able to display the new technology at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit during January 2009.
