Jaguar Land Rover working on Bike Sense for motorists

Carrying on the safety feature race, Jaguar Land Rover has just revealed its ‘Bike Sense’ that will essentially tap on the driver’s shoulder and ring a bicycle bell inside the car thus informing a potential hazard. This system will host a collection of new technologies employing the use of colours, sounds and touch inside of a vehicle to assist drivers in preventing accidents.

The clever bit is that instead of using a conventional warning sign or icon on the dash, this system will use lights and sound thus reducing the time taken by the driver’s brain to react. As the bicyclist or a motorcyclist gets closer to your car, a matrix of LED lights on the window sills, dashboard and windscreen pillars will glow amber and then red as the bike approaches.

The movement of these red and amber lights across these surfaces will also highlight the direction the bike is taking. Also if the driver does ignore the warnings and presses the accelerator, ‘Bike Sense’ will make the accelerator pedal vibrate or feel stiff, so the driver instinctively knows not to move the car forwards until the hazard has been avoided.

Dr Wolfgang Epple, Director of Research and Technology, Jaguar Land Rover, spoke “Human beings have developed an instinctive awareness of danger over thousands of years. Certain colours like red and yellow will trigger an immediate response, while everyone recognises the sound of a bicycle bell. Bike Sense takes us beyond the current technologies of hazard indicators and icons in wing mirrors, to optimising the location of light, sound and touch to enhance this intuition. This creates warnings that allow a faster cognitive reaction as they engage the brain’s instinctive responses. If you see the dashboard glowing red in your peripheral vision, you will be drawn to it and understand straight away that another road user is approaching that part of your vehicle.”