An amazing new system that safely pulls the car over in the event of a driver heart attack has been developed by BMW.
Emergency Stop Assistant, part of BMW's 'SmartSenior' project, takes over driving duties when it has detected that the driver has suffered cardiac arrest.
BMW says that because life expectancies are increasing so too is the age that drivers remain active behind the wheel. Emergency Stop Assistant mitigates the effects of a crash after a heart attack; it's the crash itself that can prove fatal in these circumstances.
It requires the driver to wear a heart-monitoring sensor - specially developed by Siemens - that communicates with the car.
During a demonstration BMW showed how the system works at motorway speed. Once activated, steering and braking become automatic; the car 'stabilises' into a position central in the lane, then makes for the hard shoulder.
If the car is in the middle or outside lane, sensors detect it and will only change lanes if there's a safe gap. Once it's safe to do so, the car will pull onto the hard shoulder and brake to a stop, before calling emergency services automatically.
"In the first stage of development we deliberately narrowed down the variety of complex driving situations and developed the Emergency Stop Assistant prototype initially for use on motorways," said project leader Dr. Peter Waldmann.
Mark Nichol - 11 Oct 2010