In Germany the number of casualties in passenger car to pedestrian crashes has been reduced by a considerable amount of 40% as regards fatalities and 25% with regard to seriously injured pedestrians since the year 2001. Similar trends can be seen in other European countries. The reasons for that positive development are still under investigation. As infrastructural or behavioral changes do in g...

The present experiment investigated the effect of small amber lamps mounted near the front and rear on each side of a passenger car-so called side marker lamps-on visual detection and recognition of passenger cars in complex nighttime environments. It was determined whether cars equipped with side marker lamps are detected and recognized earlier and more accurately than cars without side marker...

This paper estimates the degree of altruism among spouses by examining how often the driver of a car sacrifices his or her own self in a car crash in order to save a spouse. Holding constant the magnitude of a collision, a driver can maneuver the car to distribute the risk from collision between the driver and a passenger. We quantify spousal altruism by the degree to which drivers riding with ...

Witnesses detected a burning car in the parking lot next to a discotheque in the early morning hours. After the fire had been extinguished, the charred body of the 23-year-old car owner was found in the driver's seat. The young man had been a guest of the discotheque the previous night and consumed plenty of alcoholic drinks. The traces left by the fire on the car suggested that the fire had st...

In this study, Fuzzy PID Control scheme is designed for an active suspension system. The main goal of an active suspension system for using in a vehicle model is reducing body deflections and handling high comfort for a passenger car. The present system was modelled as a two-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) nonlinear vehicle model. Keywords—Active suspension system, Fuzzy PID controller, a nonlinear q...

In this study, Fuzzy PID Control scheme is designed for an active suspension system. The main goal of an active suspension system for using in a vehicle model is reducing body deflections and handling high comfort for a passenger car. The present system was modelled as a two-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) nonlinear vehicle model. Keywords—Active suspension system, Fuzzy PID controller, a nonlinear q...

Feasibilities of heat and cold storage technologies for vehicles were discussed for improvement of vehicle fuel efficiency. Energy performance of a plug-in cold thermal energy storage system, in which ice slurry is produced at a stationary chiller and charged into a tank in a vehicle for cabin and cargo cooling, was discussed. Energy balance of the plug-in system was compared with onboard heat ...

This paper presents and discusses the results obtained by the GOLD (Generic Obstacle and Lane Detection) system as an automatic driver of ARGO. ARGO is a Lancia Thema passenger car equipped with a computer vision system that allows to extract road and environmental information from the acquired scene; it has been demonstrated to drive autonomously on a number of different road and environmental...

Number of breakdowns experienced by a machinery is a highly under-dispersed count random variable and its value can be attributed to the factors related to the mechanical input and output of that machinery. Analyzing such under-dispersed count observations as a function of the explanatory factors has been a challenging problem. In this paper, we aim at estimating the effects of various factors ...