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Continental Sensor System Catches Car Vandals, Improves Automated Parking

Auto-industry supplier Continental has unveiled at CES 2020 in Las Vegas a new sensor system that would potentially keep car vandals at bay, while also improving automated parking by preventing low-speed accidents, reading road and weather conditions, and enabling communication with the vehicle.
Sensor system CoSSy from Continental 6 photos
Photo: Continental
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CoSSy (short for Contact Sensor System) is comprised of 2 to 12 sensors located in strategic positions on the body of the vehicle, Continental explained last month in a press release. The sensors would offer more accurate and long-range readings than other sensors on the market, which would make the system ideal for a myriad of functionalities.

One of them would be to detect and document car vandalism. Since the sensors can pick up a touch as light as a tap or from a small and light object falling on the vehicle, if someone bumped into or keyed your car, an alarm could be triggered. In turn, the alarm would activate a camera that would catch the bad guy in the act.

CoSSy is also able to pick up acoustic events like rain or water hitting the body of the car. As such, it can be used to detect and monitor road conditions, but also to predict the odds of hydroplaning, Continental says.

The sensors would also improve automated parking, because they would pick up an impact with the smallest obstacle, bringing the vehicle to an immediate stop. It would function just as well in terms of preventing other low-speed accidents.

“Structure-born and airborne sound are signals which provide valuable information about the immediate vehicle surrounding. CoSSy is specially developed to pick up the sound patterns of a number of types of contact. Structure-borne sound, for instance, warns when hitting an obstacle at the low speed level of automated parking,” Laurent Fabre, head of the Passive Safety & Sensorics business unit within Continental explains.

“However, once CoSSy is on board, its detection principle can be used to add many more functions thus adding to the safety and comfort of a ride,” Fabre adds.

Other applications for CoSSy include detecting approaching emergency vehicles, driver identification by voice recognition, and even communication between car and driver through touch (a tap on the door could open the door, for example).
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About the author: Elena Gorgan
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Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends.
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