One of New York’s finest and most famous landmarks, Brooklyn Bride, proved to be a key testing ground for the Cadillac XTS, their brand new flagship sedan. That’s because a bridge is built using a lot of iron, which can mess up the radar waves used by its numerous safety systems.
With traffic jams routinely occurring on bridges, the Cadillac’s Driver Awareness and Driver Assist active safety systems could prove useful in maintaining a safe distance between you and other cars in the stop-and-go driving environment.
The XTS gets around the interference from the metal in the bridge by using a Sensor Fusion, which combines data from cameras as well.
“The camera, sensors and radar technology act as the ‘brain’ behind all the safety features, feeding data 25 times per second into the car’s computer network,” said Jim Nickolaou, lead engineer for Sensor Fusion. “We found that the best way to test the system’s accuracy was to gauge its performance in stressful driving conditions that could confuse it, like those conditions found on the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“We have to try and anticipate every scenario, especially those that really challenge the technology,” Nickolaou said. “We tune the systems to discern actual obstacles from other things in the vicinity that should not cause a warning or braking action.”
Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida. Full profile
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