- Active Head Restraints. These are the things that keep your neck in place. A safety feature that is a veteran to the game, active head restraints are the upraised part on the top of your seat that sometimes has a little hole in the middle of it. If you get into a collision where someone hits you in the rear, that’s where the active head restraints come into play. They’re kind of like headrests, but in a bind they are very useful for avoiding whiplash. You can adjust them up, down, or to the side to fit your height. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, newer cars still haven’t caught up with active head restraint technology and most didn’t do so well on car crash tests on head restraints. Volvo did, though.
- Adaptive Cruise Control. A long time ago, when cars had only recently been invented, the people of early twentieth century imagined that in the future in a few years cars would be able to drive themselves while the passengers just laid back and watched. It’s kind of like how we thought we might have flying cars by the year 2000 (okay, well at least I did when I was ten). Adaptive cruise control is about a close to that ideal as we’ve gotten. It adds a radar to a regular cruise control system which figures out how far one car is from another, letting the driver fix their car so that it stays a certain amount of distance away from the cars around him. If a crash comes on, the system causes the car to brake and out come the air bags.
- Headlights. I know what you’re thinking. There’s nothing new about these. However, for the past ten years an upgraded version of headlights, which run dimmed in the day, has been going around. These daytime running lights help to increase visibility in the daytime hours and play a role in preventing frontal impacts during the day. Audi has come out with something even better, with its adaptive headlights that actually illuminate around corners.
Cheers,
Fashun Guadarrama.