Let’s take a look at modern car technology so we thought we’d do a series on what’s available in modern cars today and today it’s about parking technology and the types of parking technology you’ll find when you buy your new car. Today we’re going to look at parking sensors and the different types of things you’ll find in cars. 360 degree cameras remote parking technology semi-autonomous parking technology and finally reverse assistant. The two cars we’re using are the kia sorento and the bmw x5.
They have almost the full range of technology and we’ll be able to take a look at it all. If you want to skip to other parts of this video you can use the time codes on the screen there or if you’re on YouTube scroll down and use the chapters below if you haven’t already I’d be happy if you could subscribe and hit the bell. This icon will tell you that whenever we release a video of this car technology, before we do some actual testing, let’s take a look at the technology. Now there are three main types of parking technology, you have ultrasonic sensors, you have electromagnetic sensors and radar, the most common type is the ultrasonic sensor right now. How well does it work? It emits sound waves at a frequency that is too high for the human ear, just like when my wife tells me to vacuum and it goes into that ear and it emits a sound wave anyway, the sound wave then bounces off an object and comes back to the car and using a simple calculation the car is able to determine how far away the object is from the car and for those of you out there the formula is distance equals half the time times the speed of sound, the speed of sound varies depending on temperature and humidity and that’s why these cars have temperature sensors and they can change that calculation so they know exactly how close the car is and it’s never too confused by humid conditions or hot or cold temperatures. They are quite similar to radar. The way they work is they emit a wave, the wave comes back and then they do a calculation Radar is much more expensive although they are very cheap, the only downside is that radar works over long distances and works well with most objects. They don’t work well with objects that absorb sound so things like people wearing these kinds of things on their flesh and they also don’t work well with objects that reflect sound waves and you can think of things like metal poles like this if you hit a sound wave you only have a very narrow beam that will come back to the car the rest will be scattered so you have redundancy you have one here, another there, another there, so you never see a car with just one parking sensor. They all team up to find the right amount of distance between your car and the object you are going into or going in the opposite direction. Now to move on to the second type of parking technology while most cars use ultrasonic sensors, you also have electromagnetic sensors, ultrasonic sensors emit a sound wave whereas electromagnetic sensors emit a radio wave, it emits it at a specific frequency when the wave is blocked. It is reflected back to the car at a different frequency by an object. The car is then able to detect the change in frequency and then calculate the distance between the car and that object. Now there is an electromagnetic sensor behind the bumper bar and the big advantage is that you don’t actually have to drill holes in the bumper bar and have these nasty things. These are more common in the aftermarket. Although we can’t actually think of any new cars on the market that have electromagnetic sensors, so I’m here to let you smart viewers know, let me know in the comments section below which new cars on the market today have electromagnetic sensors and if you have found electromagnetic sensors on an older car, finally the third type of radar you can’t see it.
because it’s behind the bumper bar so unlike the front radar you’ll find on a lot of new cars today that deals with safety systems and radar cruise control there’s a radar mounted in this section of the car that actually points this way now when you think about it you can’t have a radar on the back because the waves are emitted like this whereas a radar on the side the waves come out like this and it’s able to detect oncoming vehicles and this is used for things like rear cross traffic alert if you’re reversing out into a blind spot and there is a vehicle a cyclist or an object coming towards the car you’re not going to be able to see it so that radar sits behind this section of the car the other section and then some also have them mounted to the front so you have both coverage at the front and the rear so all of these sensors are important but equally as important is the visual aspect and we all know about the reverse view camera it’s common on a lot of cars today but the advancement of that is called the 360 degree camera or the bird’s eye view as it’s also known that basically takes the reverse camera a camera at the front of the car plus these wide angle cameras on the wing mirrors and stitches the image together so you get a view from top down and it gives you a better visibility around the car let’s see what that looks like okay so we’ll flick the car on we will pop it into drive and i’ll manually activate the cameras here so there it is there you can see an overlay of the car plus everything around it the car is manually taking all of the images from these cameras and stitching them together so you get a live view of the front and then this bird’s eye view the 360 degree view this is particularly handy if you live in an apartment building for example like i do you can see clearly where the walls are and then even in these situations here as you’re traversing some of these bays you’ll never have an excuse for not being able to get the car perfectly within the parking bay and then you can also select different views as well so you can see there the wheel view so you will never curb those wheels either so not all cars have good quality 360 cameras so just make sure you test this out before you buy the car because they won’t all look as sharp as this one does but let’s move into the test of the ultrasonic sensors here so we’re coming into a parking bay here we’ll test the front parking sensor first so you can see that 360 degree camera is handy for getting us into the bay we’re approaching an object at the front of the car those sensors are now emitting those sound waves determining how close we are and as we get closer you see the intensity of the beeps increase and then finally you get a red indicator showing you that yes you are hard up against that object and you don’t want to be going any further okay what about reverse parking sensors it looks like someone’s put a suitcase in the way these work in the same way but in reverse let’s see what happens as we approach it okay the car has just slammed the brakes on it’s come up saying emergency braking now the reason it’s done that is because this car has reverse aeb so it works the same as aeb does going forwards it stops the car if you don’t as you’re about to hit something now imagine if that was a kid or a person that’s walked behind your car it’s able to use those ultrasonic sensors to detect that and slam the brakes on so you don’t hit them this is crucial technology and why we think it should be fitted to every single new car today now but you’re wondering where does the radar come into play in all of this well an ultrasonic sensor only really works well three to five meters away from the car the radar on the other hand can look further down the road and these side radars built into the bumper bar are used for things called rear cross traffic alert that’s able to detect cars pedestrians cyclists that are walking driving cycling towards the car and when you’re wedged in next to an suv like this and you really can’t see anything until you’re well and truly in that line of traffic this is where it’s going to come in handy so let’s give this a shot so i’m reversing out of the park here and there’s a car coming right there okay so it has automatically slammed the brakes on given me a warning that there was a vehicle coming and you can see here that i still can’t see beyond this suv so had i have not seen that there was every chance
that i would have run into that obviously people are meant to drive out slowly and be careful but in situations where you have a car that’s moving quickly or you’re just not paying attention this kind of technology could potentially save you from having a nasty accident okay next up we have remote parking now this feature was first made popular by tesla because they rolled it out in the model s and they call it summon and it’s now advanced enough to be able to bring the car to you from a distance in a car park which i think is pretty cool and i was going to demonstrate it with my model 3 but i refuse to pay 10 000 for the full self-driving package so instead we’re going to use the kia sorento which has a feature very similar to that that works using the key fob so what exactly is the purpose of this well right on cue our obnoxious friend in the bmw has turned up and made it quite hard for me to get inside the car anyway let me show you how it works so we come back here push lock push the hold button that will kick the car over once it’s on we can either select forwards or reverse we’re going to go reverse so i can actually get inside the car see the reverse lights come on and then the car will slowly come back towards us there it comes so the sensors are working the whole time to make sure it doesn’t hit anything and just to show you that it works i’ll let it come back towards me and hopefully stop there it is there pops your uncle i can now get in the car and get away from this plug okay so we’ve just hopped into the bmw and this has some technology that you’re going to find handy if all of the parking sensors in the world the 360 degree cameras all the radars and stuff still don’t inspire you with confidence and that is semi-autonomous parking and there’s two main types parallel and perpendicular so we’ve got a perpendicular park here in between these two cars and i want to show you how it works so what the car does using parking sensors that point outwards from the front and the rear it starts measuring spaces to determine whether the predefined size of this car can actually fit in there so we can see right now that we’ve gone past this park and it said yes you can actually fit into that park so we’re going to come to a stop you select the symbol there and it begins the process it’ll put it into reverse it’ll put it into drive it’ll do everything so even from this super awkward angle it’s going to take care of everything all i’m doing is just hovering over the brake pedal now this is a perpendicular park you’ll see we get close to there it’s now put it into drive and turn the car around all the way this is such cool stuff i love that modern cars were able to do all of this okay so it’s back into reverse now and it is taking care of that process i’ll be curious to see how straight it is within this park because it’s a fairly tight park but um i’ll be curious to see whether we’re still in the lines and you’ll be able to see it with this 360 camera there we go it’s still going back look at that that’s actually like perfect and it will come to a stop on its own as well once it’s done and there it is there part complete how cool is that now that system also works with parallel parking and arguably this is generally the more difficult thing to do because perpendicular you can kind of sort of figure it out but here it can sometimes be a little bit daunting so what it’s doing now same story it’s checking to see if this gap that we’re coming past now is big enough for the car so it’s still measuring it and there it is there it is telling us it is big enough for the car so same sorry we click this button it does the whole thing autonomously so all i’m doing is hovering over the brake i’m not really going to touch it but because it’s eagle’s car we’re backing into i also don’t want to hit that all right here it is so it’s pulling in nicely yeah this is cool i’m always conscious of curbs as well especially with suvs with such big wheels okay so it is getting closer and closer it’s come to a stop on its own there put itself into drive and it’s bringing us forward to complete the park there it is okay now so you’ve used your parallel parking feature to get you into the park but how do you get out of it because if you’ve used the computer to get in you’re probably not going to be able to get out well a lot of the vehicles that have this parallel parking semi-autonomous technology also have an exit assistant and it works much the same way so we hit this button Here it’s telling us if you’re leaving the parking space, confirm the direction that we want to go forward and it starts a process again so that it takes us back and then it starts the process of clearing enough space for the car in front so that we can get there safely. It’s there and it’s giving us a little more room. Okay, it needs a little more room. It needs a little more backing up. Oh god, I hate it when we get close. Okay, a little more is fine. Park take full control. It means we’re clear of the car in front and we can finally use some technology that at first I thought was incredibly pointless but when you think about it it’s actually useful, it’s called Reverse Assistant. It comes to BMW. I suspect they’ll introduce it to other brands and things like that in the future but the purpose of it is that it remembers the last 50 meters of steering input so let’s pretend for now that we’re going down a narrow lane. Our car has a nice set of wheels and we’re getting to the end. The laneway is right where our suitcase is, and we discovered that it’s in a deadlock. How do you get back in without rubbing the wheels or doing any damage? So if you put it in reverse hit reverse assist, it will give you a 50 meter countdown and take over the steering. It will remember the last 50 meters of steering input and then guide you exactly where you went. We’ve set up a little course here with the Sorrento and the MX-5 to make sure it all works. It’s actually working well so far and it’s able to remember your steering input even after you’ve left the car, so if you go on vacation for a month or something like that, it will still remember the steering input when you come back. So I don’t know if you leave your car in the laneway and decide to come back later, it’s pretty impressive. I think it’s working exactly the same way we did. I won’t even leave out the front of the Eagle, which looks like it’s doing an interesting job. We’re going down to our last 10 meters, which is about eight or seven, so when it gets to zero, I think we’re going to be asked to take two meters one meter of steering, we’re actually going to end up right where we started. Look, this is great, so exactly 50 meters, the funny thing is, it’s reverse assistant. Hopefully we’ll see it used in some more cars because I think it’s really convenient. I know I’ve been in one or two situations, especially in expensive cars where you just don’t want to scrape the wheel or damage anything where something like that would be incredibly useful. So parking technology explained, there’s some great technology out there and if you use some of it from time to time, it’s okay to admit. I know I couldn’t live without parking sensors and I’ve come dangerously close to hitting things with them, so everyone needs a little help sometimes.