Gadgetory

your parents and driving as they get past their 60s they begin to get a lot less good at it now that concepts nothing new but technologies that can help our I'm Brian Cooley with the top five car technologies that you might want to nudge your folks to consider when they buy their next car number five is failing to yield failing to yield at an intersection or blowing a stopper red light is charged in some thirty-seven percent of elder accidents but I rank this low because technology to help a lot is still pending that would be vehicle to vehicle communications that will let cars signal each other to avoid a collision the US government is set to launch rules likely in 2014 but it wouldn't be in cars for several years after that meantime remind dad it doesn't matter who had the right-of-way the real win is not getting into a crash number four inattentiveness or lost in thought definitely the most poetically described thing I've ever seen in government research it's not a huge portion of driver distraction most older drivers actually don't drive distracted but now we do have tech from Ford Mercedes BMW and Volvo to detect and alert driver drowsiness what we are missing still is something to get inside the head of drivers older otherwise and just refocus their attention when they're wide awake number three side impacts left and right side hits amount to about thirty percent of all elder crashes when sorted by impact angle to technologies can help here the first is passive or active blind spot technology now if it's passive make sure the warning lights are big invisible like I find in Audis if mom and dad seem to always be cutting off let's say a bike on the right hand side then look into hondas cars that have a camera that looks down the right side of the vehicle when you signal that way my second tech tip is kind of low tech it's a car that has clean sight lines out the a-pillars these are the ones that hold up the front of the windshield now there are big differences in these between cars generally the more slope and thicker the a-pillar the more stuff you can complete who's behind it until it's too late number two rear-end collisions this is a big one for older drivers a few years ago mom and dad would have had to have been fairly money to get technology help here today no longer the case it's not just Volvo's Mercedes and infinity to have forward collision tech look at Subarus eyesight a great example of an affordable car with camera technican sense of forward collision and break all the way down to a dead stop if need be to prevent a rear ender and it works at closing speed Delta's at up to 19 miles per hour which is quite a bit before it gets you to number one evidence that sixty really is the new 50 drivers in their 60s are actually not involved in a lot more accidents with other cars in fact they're less involved than people in their teens and 20s now it's the 70s and 80s where things get rough and drivers over 80 have five times the accident risk compared to people in their 40s and 50s that's the red zone the number one place where tech can help your folks is backing up whether their necks are too stiff to turn around and look or their eyes are too bad to see anything if they do backing up is a problem for old folks adding up to some twenty three percent of crash impact points a rear cam in their car is a must now they are likely to become required on new cars in a couple of years but they already show up on most new cars already so this will be one less argument you have to have when your parent says oh I don't need that yes in the meantime convince them that they have to have it and a surround camera option might not hurt either but i find the display zones on those tend to be awfully small that rear cam is the big one know all about high-tech cars and modern driving by visiting us at cnet on cars.com i'm brian cool