The smart cockpit will overthrow the safety protection in the car. Is this reliable?

Cars are developing towards "smart cockpits". Nowadays, if you ask young people how to play tapes and CDs in cars, I guess many of them can no longer answer the question. The electric panoramic sunroof, which was a selling point of luxury cars 20 years ago, has now reached the 100,000 level.

Looking at the self-driving concept cars unveiled at major auto shows, they simply lose the concept of a driver. They wish to eliminate the steering wheel and traditional seat layout, and vow to make the car a smart home and an office scene. .

Of course you can be pleasantly surprised by technological changes and the overwhelming sense of technology, but in the era of smart cockpits, the level of in-car safety protection seems to have declined. Especially in many concept cars, we have not seen the same level as "traditional cars".

Because of the promotion of automobile safety monitoring organizations led by NCAP and IIHS, in-car safety has developed rapidly in the past 20 years, making remarkable progress compared with 20 years ago. Since we want to compare, it is necessary to clearly explain the results of "traditional cars" that we understand.

The development results of in-car safety can be summarized in the following three aspects:

Airbags

Airbags are a real modern safety product that was not introduced until 1953. With the first airbag patent, the German company Mercedes only realized small batch production in 1980. Many people born in the 1980s took their first cars without airbags.

Car airbags are increasingly used in cars from initial driver protection to side protection to knee protection and so on. Up to now, the richness of airbags includes main and passenger airbags, main and passenger knee airbags, main and passenger side airbags, main and passenger side curtain airbags, and even seat belt airbags.

Ergonomics

Ergonomics can be summed up in one sentence as guidance that makes people comfortable or easy to operate. The main driving seat surround design that has become popular in recent years is one of them. The central control screen is slightly tilted towards the driver's side, which can effectively avoid the impact of reflection.

Taking a broad view, ergonomics is a relatively broad concept. For example, why the driver's airbag is installed on the steering wheel, and the position of the side airbags and side airbags all take into account the impact of the car on the passengers behind it. movement trajectory.

Interior Structural Safety

The concept of structural safety is rarely spread, but it is equally important. Because there is a risk of contact between a person and surrounding parts after an impact, there should be no excessively sharp or protruding parts in the car. Don't think this is empty talk. "GB11552-2009? Interior protrusions in passenger cars" is a legally enforceable national standard that restricts manufacturers. The instrument panel and sub-instrument panel head impact tests we mentioned in the article are all based on this set of standards. The red hammer head simulates the human head. The picture above shows a certain car model. The armrest box adopts a bi-folding method, and the sharp corners that are knocked open are very dangerous.

As for those invisible structural safety, we are also "Still rushing to sit in the back row?" In the article "Family Car Rear Seat Safety Is Overtaken (Part 2)", we talked about "anti-dive design". I just want to warn design companies not to think that moving household seats to cars is the end of the story. The approach is really different.

Nowadays, the mass-produced intelligent cockpits are mainly based on traditional interior layouts and make fuss about the control system, such as integrating physical buttons into the display screen to support voice control and gesture control.

BMW is proud of its gesture control. You can control the volume by moving your index finger forward and rotating it clockwise. Compared with swiping your finger on the touch screen, it is both cool and more blind. feasibility.

In terms of voice control, each company has also begun to emphasize the recognizability of the system and how to incorporate more control functions. It has become fashionable to eliminate physical buttons.

However, regarding in-car safety, at least in the following three aspects, we have not seen any car or concept car give us comprehensive answers. They will be the safety pain points of smart cockpits.

It is not reliable to completely cancel the physical buttons

In the article "Electric vehicles are keen on integrating large screens, are they lazy?" we mentioned that integrating large screens is the future trend. This This article has received a lot of attention on a certain platform, and there are constant complaints in the comment area about the loss of security caused by the cancellation of physical buttons.

The airbag layout is unreliable

Because the layout of the car has changed a lot, the layout of the airbags is also required to change accordingly. For example, the so-called 360-degree rotating seats will pose great safety challenges because of the lack of airbags placed on the dashboard and seat belts alone. You don’t want us to rely on wearable airbags to save our lives in the future, right?

The design of car seats is unreliable

We often see very simplified seats in concept cars. The advantage of this less?is?more industrial style is that it can increase the It's technological, but I'm totally reluctant to use it. Have they really considered the structural safety? Since the seat is the largest component in the car, the sense of space and technology in the car will be affected by it. Therefore, the seat design of concept cars is actually difficult to be used in mass production.

As we have seen above, no matter whether it is the current leading model or concept car, they actually fail to show us a perfect in-car safety solution, and many designs are quite exaggerated.

I would say that manufacturers cannot build cars with the same thinking as building buses. Private cars are used in more complex scenarios and at faster speeds, and they must have the necessary safety protections. Therefore, we should focus on at least the following three aspects.

More accurate and complete voice control system

The elimination of physical buttons is a major trend, and the era of large central control screens is unstoppable, but at least the language control system/gesture control system should be strengthened ability to increase the feasibility of blind practice.

Voice control is called the "machine's hearing system" by scientists. The bottlenecks of today's vehicle voice control systems are mainly in wake-up, sound source localization and computing power. There must be a wake-up slogan every time, which seems rigid; the sound source positioning is easy to get stuck when the car is noisy, and entering commands feels like quarreling.

Although the method proposed by some brands such as Lideal is to mainly collect the sound of the main driver's seat and weaken the sound pickup volume of other seats, this reduces the humanity. In the future, the recognition ability of the voice system will still need to be increased. yes.

When it comes to recognition, a single data provision is not enough. This requires independent learning capabilities and sustainable upgrade capabilities. This is why we always hear about smart AI, OTA upgrades and super chips. reason.

Airbags that are more in line with the new layout

As the interior of the car becomes more home-like and office-based, how to install more appropriate airbags will be a big issue. In the future, there may be "enveloping airbags" like the one pictured below. Its advantage is that it is more independent and does not need to cooperate with other components in the car to ensure safety.

Seat design ideas to be evolved

Using the idea of ??building bus stools to build car seats is not impossible, but the speed of the car is faster and the road conditions are more complex. As an important component of safety protection, chairs are not easy to tear down and start over. So in my opinion, car seats in the future should become more and more complex, not simpler.

Future car seats will assume more safety protection responsibilities. If you see a concept seat with a minimalist design in the future, you can ignore it because it will almost never be mass-produced.

Regarding the development of smart cockpits, we are pleasantly surprised by the upgrade of the interior. However, there are still many issues worthy of discussion as to whether the car is really suitable for home use and office use. At least in terms of security, in order to seize the high ground of intelligent design with more commercial value, everyone seems not to pay much attention to it.

Looking at the current situation, we are in the throes of the development of the times. Because the use of large screens eliminates physical buttons, and the voice control system is not perfect enough, the safety level has been reduced.

However, judging from the development process of automobile history, technology is always one step ahead of safety, which is the inevitable development of the times. As you can see from the above introduction, improving in-car safety is not unsolvable, but more of an ideological issue.

Picture?|?From the Internet

This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.