Each spring, repair shops welcome us as we replace blown tires and straighten bent rims on our test cars. But if Jaguar Land Rover's new pothole sensors work, we could kill this cycle entirely and free up money to spend on more important things, like company-paid prime-rib dinners.
Jaguar Land Rover, drawing data from the road-sensing magnetic shocks in a Range Rover Evoque, is working to record the magnitude of road impacts, tag their location, and upload them to a cloud server where other drivers would be warned of a potential pothole, sunken manhole cover, or deep storm drain. When combined with a stereo camera—two optical cameras positioned close together for judging depth, such as onSubaru's EyeSight system—the car could precisely locate that hole in the road, snap a pic, and report it to the local public-works authority.
In the same way that Magic Body Control claims to work in the new Mercedes S-class, the Range Rover's shocks would also prepare for impact if the driver doesn't heed the warning, tensing and slackening accordingly (we've found the Benz feature works best only on speed bumps found in Europe, and it can't react fast enough for potholes).
The technology isn't new. In 2011, the city of Boston released "Street Bump," an app that uses a smartphone's accelerometer to record the amplitude of in-car jolts and send their locations to city hall, where humans can filter them from speed bumps or curbs. Volvo is developing a cloud system for real-time ice warnings that would also dispatch road crews, and moisture sensors embedded on the roadways near our Ann Arbor office are doing the same as part of a vehicle-to-vehicle network trial.
Can it work? Four years later, Boston's roads still loosen dental fillings and control-arm joints, so while using technology to create a pothole database sounds cool, it seems what we really need is for the cloud to somehow actually patch the pavement.
From: Car and Driver
Clifford Atiyeh is a reporter and photographer for Car and Driver, specializing in business, government, and litigation news. He is president of the New England Motor Press Association and committed to saving both manuals and old Volvos.
