'Safety Technology' is very much to the forefront at Centro Richerce Fiat, with two new pioneering developments, the HMI 'Human Machine Interface' and OEDIBUS, a head-up display, both successfully moving towards being production ready.

Centro Richerce Fiat (CRF), the Fiat Group's advanced design centre, is building a strong reputation for developing innovative new safety features, a direction made all the more relevant by new European Union road safety legislation which seeking, in the longer term, to halve road fatality figures.

We concentrate here on two impending new technolgies in, the first mentioned being, HMI 'Human Machine Interface', which we first previewed on Italiaspeed last year, and which, after successful trials, is approaching production readiness.

This is the first production-ready member of the 'Information Manager', which is controlled by the Human Machine Interface, is called the Risk Evaluation Module (REM). It provides collective information about a series of general driving scenarios, which are then visually distributed by a display, located in a dedicated console, situated next to the driver.

These driver-relevant scenarios include outside temperature, driving conditions, level of activity, and level of use of other on-board systems.

HMI uses data gathered from a number of sensors positioned around the vehicle, as well as tapping knowledge from other devices in operation in the car, to develop a real time level of risk. 
 

Another project presently under development at CRF is a 'virtual Head-up Display' (HUD) that takes a thoughtful new route. With more than 50 percent of road accidents taking place at night, and over 60 percent of pedestrian fatalities also occurring during the hours of darkness, although, only one third of road journey's are undertaken during this period, night-specific driving safety solutions have become almost a 'holy grail' for car manufacturers.

The HUD bounces the dashboard display onto the windscreen, thus bringing it into the driver's line of sight, and immediately reducing the driver's need to remove his attention from the road ahead.

"Conventional HUDs project the image onto the car windscreen. The problem with conventional displays is that they are expensive and occupy an unacceptably large volume, typically in a range from three to five litres, which is impractical for most car instrument clusters," comments Piermario Repetto of Centro Richerce Fiat and OEDIBUS coordinator.