Toyota Partners with MIT, Others on Safety Programs

2011-09-15

Ann Arbor  "Drivers are urged to keep their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel" and offtheir smartphones. But they canbe looking straight ahead and still be distractedif they're engaged in conversation on a hands-free phone or with the car's voice-activated controls,according to studiesat the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Keeping your eyes on the road doesn't mean your mind is on the road," said Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at MIT, which will work with Toyota Motor Corp. on a study to quantify how voice-activated systems affect drivers. The project is one of several that Toyota's new Collaborative Research Safety Center is conducting with educational and other institutions to improve vehicle safety.
Toyota officials announced at the Detroit auto show at the start of this year that the company, struggling to restore its reputation after massivesafety recalls, would spend $50 million over five years on safetyresearch projects, most of themwithU.S. partners.
"The establishment of the Collaborative Safety Research Center was the direct result of the commitment that (Toyota President) Akio Toyoda made to Congress and to the American people that Toyota would advance automotive safety research," said Chuck Gulash, director of the center.
Its research will be available to other automakers and organizations in a bid to make all cars and trucks safer. The center also aims tocontribute to and help speed up the establishment of industry-widestandards, said Moritaka Yoshida, Toyota's chief safety technology officer. Based in Japan, he traveled to Ann Arbor to attend a two-day conference on the safety projects at Toyota's North American technical center.
In addition to tackling driver distraction " one of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's chief concerns" the center also is trying toaddress the needs ofvulnerable groups, such as the elderly, small children and young drivers. Drivers in their teens and early twenties are involved in farmore fatal accidents proportionately than other adults, as are people in their late seventies and older.
Vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for 16- to 19-year-olds, who are lessexperienced and more reckless than older drivers, studies show.
Toyota is teaming up with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute on a project to film young drivers and alert them to any risky behaviors they display. The teenagers don't seem inhibited by the cameras as they eat, dial phones and multi-task in other ways. "We believe it's in the first couple of hours that people forget" that they're being observed, said Charlie Klauer at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.
The widespread use of seatbelts and other so-called passive safety systems has helped bring down U.S. traffic fatalities even though people are driving more.
"But still, 30,000 people are killed a year," Gulash said. That total includes a disproportionate number of elderly drivers and passengers whose bodies and bones, particularly rib cages,change shape over the years. They needairbags and seat belts that take these changes into account.
The elderly also tend to have slower reaction times and reduced fields of vision. But their powers of observation can be improved by exercises that can be done on desktop computers, such as the DriveSharp program.
Toyota will develop special senior versions of its virtual test dummies, called Thums, for Total Human Model for Safety, which depict how organs as well as bones react to outside force and are used by suppliers and other companies.
"The collaborative approach is a way to accelerate and also to standardize" which is a really critical issue," said David Cole, chairman emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor and now with AutoHarvest, an organization promoting auto technology sharing.
Toyota will team up with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute to study the relationship between age and seated posture in a car, and how that affects seat-belt fit.
Toyota will study the Washtenaw County crash data archive to explore new models of post-crash data collection and ways to prevent collisions.
It will conduct a three-year study of driver distraction with Wayne State University's School of Medicine, as well as a longer joint study into body characteristics of children and seniors and how to take them into account when designing safety systems.

CHRISTINE TIERNEY
/ The Detroit News