Volvo unveils the Auto Brake

No, not the automobile brake — that came at the same time as the horseless carriage, even if the people behind you on the freeway don’t seem familiar with it.  Volvo now has an automatic braking system for city driving that keeps drivers from ending up in the trunk of the car ahead of them.  It’s the perfect gift for the attention-deficit crowd that pays more attention to their Blackberry than the traffic on the road:

Some mope chatting on a cell phone, texting his roommate or skimming the Blackberry for messages so he has fewer to answer during the game tonight doesn’t notice that the car ahead on the Kennedy Expressway has stopped.

Bam!

Only a 5-m.p.h. impact, but by the time it’s reported and traffic squeezes into the two other lanes, everyone is going to be at least an hour late. …

Enter Volvo and its new City Safety system, which uses infrared imaging to read up to 18 feet ahead and sense that a car is there going slower than you or stopped. A collision waiting to happen.

Volvo demonstrated City Safety, which will be standard on its 2010 XC60 crossover derived from the S80 sedan when it goes on sale in March. It is visiting local dealers—we attended the program at Patrick Volvo —to give consumers a look at the system.

The City Safety system doesn’t deliver a smooth, gliding stop for the awareness-impaired drivers it protects.  It hits the ABS brakes with full force, meaning the Blackberry will go sailing at the dashboard and the driver will hit the windshield if he didn’t remember to fasten his safety belt first.  It also only works at slow speeds, 9 MPH and below, which is why they call it City Safety.  It’s intended for bumper-to-bumper driving that bores drivers so much that they look for distractions to take their minds off the fact that they could probably walk faster than traffic during rush hour.

Is this really a good idea?  If everyone had it at the same time, maybe.  Unfortunately, the driver behind the oaf who pays more attention to text messaging than traffic will not have much time to respond to the sudden stop of the car ahead of him.  He’ll likely pay the price for the ADD of the driver ahead of him.  Still, it’s a start — and maybe breaking a few Blackberries will condition drivers to pay closer attention to the task at hand.

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