Gadgetory

this week on future check the future of cars no yeah that's pretty awesome but I think when you see what's coming from safety to performance to entertainment you'll still be pretty impressed we hit the road to get a sneak peek at how car makers envision the car of tomorrow I'm here at Ford's Innovation Lab where they're figuring out the best way to adjust a seat and I mean three different interfaces including voice control to work on a seat that can even give you a massage see you come and give me a massage see you man recline seat backwards okay move seat back co-come and move seat all the way down I wanna be like and then I can cruise the humble driver's seat is also getting reinvented in other ways the next frontier in driving is real-time driver information this seat is actually measuring my respiration the steering wheel is measuring my heart rate whether I'm at all sweaty the car can tell whether I'm distracted and then actually take steps to minimize those distractions so far I seem to be doing okay my heart beats per minute is 60 19 breaths the seat belt can tell if I start to breathe more heavily because I'm stressed out as a driver even if I don't think I'm stressed the car will know I can't wait to see what it does with my road rage it has temperature sensors to see if I get hot in the face maybe in the future it could say like sweetie I think you're getting a cold maybe we should go home engineers are also coming up with innovative ways to make sitting in your car more comfortable using geeky data-driven design so what i'm doing here is measuring seat ergonomics I have these motion capture sensors on me and I'm going to try to get into this very small little back seat of a car then Ford will use that data to make sort of a digital human version of me that can help in figuring out better design for back seats so that I don't stick my knees in the back of the driver every time there I am Katie it's like a puppet oh my gosh look at this it's like a airplane seat this is why I try to never sit in the back seat abandon car I look a lot more elegant as a digital human than I probably did as a real human probably the coolest thing about the car of the future will be that it can drive itself concepts are already in existence Google has its self-driving car and Stanford is racing an Audi TTS on a track hands-free but what you might not know is that incremental steps toward autonomous driving are also underway at Ford we talked to CTO Paul masse Karina's about the march of technology and the driving experience we don't say that you know one day we're going to wake up and there's going to be an autonomous vehicle we don't we don't see what we absolutely do see though is increasing availability of more connectivity in the vehicle increasing availability of more automated driving features for example using onboard computers sensors and cameras the car is able to alert me when there's another car nearby possibly preventing a collision GM is also developing similar technologies that will keep you in your lane if you start to drift in this case the actual seat alerts you with a little vibration that actually that's really smart so it's the slow drift triggers that as opposed to something that feels kind of intentional right you know people make lane changes evasive maneuvers and so we try and only give them the warning when they really need it it's kind of tricky event to try it out Oh but my favorite demo of the day was rear automatic braking in my opinion this safety tech is the closest thing to autonomous driving because the car actually takes control this is probably the first time we've ever had the car actually take control away from the driver yeah doo doo doo - Doo no I'm just kind of oh my god and it's vibrating like crazy look how close it was I was totally like prepared to hit the pole I'm like there's no way this is gonna stop oh could we do that again yeah Wow even when it's awesome that is remarkable does it mostly work with stationary objects like if that was actually a kid it'll try to work with moving objects so hmm now hooked and hooked might even be an understatement I mean whether it's having a car stop itself to prevent a crash a seat that measures your heart rate or a seat that gives me a massage the car of the future is definitely one that I want to ride in