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one on one

2010 Ford Taurus

Seatbelts, airbags, anti-lock brakes and stability control systems are all old hat now. Human-Machine Interface is the new, new thing. Expect your next new car to come equipped with lots of radar and ADAS - that's Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.

The new Ford Taurus uses radar, not laser, to look out for slow or stopped traffic ahead to slow you down and ready the brakes. It also uses radar to check the blind spot beside you and to look out for crossing traffic when you're pulling out of a parking space. And there are lots more ADAS coming.

As global head of safety for Ford, Stephen Kozak runs a team of about 300 people in North America, Europe, Australia, China and Brazil. They're getting some results as Ford now has more U.S. government five-star safety ratings than any other automotive brand.

Vaughan: Give me an idea of what's coming next out of your safety labs.

Kozak: My dream is to have a vehicle that would drive itself.

I'll tell you why. My father is 85 years old and I've had to take his keys away from him because he's had blackouts; but the guy has mobility needs, lots of them. This guy is on the move all the time and he doesn't want to burden his children to drive him here and drive him there.

In the next 10 years, the number of people that are 65 or over will double in the United States. But Americans and Canadians do not want to surrender their keys; they want their personal freedom, personal mobility. We need to develop systems so these people can get into the car.

We're not talking about taking the driver completely out of the loop. At Ford, we believe that we need to keep the driver in the loop, but we want to be able to make that driving experience safe for everyone.

I drove a Mercedes in Germany recently that could read the road signs.

In Europe, they have uniform signs. We think sign recognition is very viable in Europe, but in North America it's very difficult.

Do you know we've got different-coloured stop signs in America? Why shouldn't all stop signs be the same size, same shape and same colour?

You could do a lot if the cars could read the signs.

Signs are one of the simplest things in the world.

One of the things that the industry needs is uniform signs. We're going to add a vision system to the vehicle, we've got radars going into the vehicle and we think that vision system can recognize signs.

You could use a face-recognition technology and start to do things, because the car knows what the speed limit is, the car knows that there's a stop light ahead.

You can kick in a lot more of the basic algorithms that allow a vehicle to take some critical control during a phase when someone just doesn't know what to do. Fifty per cent of all drivers never step on the brakes when they get into an accident. So could you imagine what we could do here if we were able to just step on the brakes?

Those are the kinds of things that would truly make a difference in the fatality rates and the injury rates.

That's an amazing stat. Half the people who get into accidents never hit the brakes.

The Japanese are running all kinds of social experiments.

In Hiroshima, they've added 25 miles of automated road signs that can communicate with the vehicle. It's what we call infrastructure-to-vehicle communication.

The U.S. government is doing studies on vehicle-to-vehicle communication where one vehicle talks to another vehicle to say danger ahead - that kind of thing.

We've got to improve the highways, not just rebuild the highways, but improve the highways, so we can take a big chunk out of the fatality rate.

Do the safety engineers get the final say in the development of vehicles these days? Do you set the rules?

Let's just say we have a big stick. If the safety guys say it has to be this way, we find a way to make that work.

And we have such good tools to use - simulation and computer tools that allow us to do optimization.

Even when we say we have to add this structural member to the vehicle, we can rearrange the structure of the entire vehicle in such a fashion that we can make it come out weight neutral. The safety guys can figure that out.

When you take a look at what needs to be balanced, the safety guys are always the first guys to do the balancing. I truly believe Ford is the leader in safety and we share it with the Volvo Corp.

Michael Vaughan is co-host with Jeremy Cato of Car/Business, which appears Fridays at 8 p.m. on Business News Network and Saturdays at 2 p.m. on CTV.

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