New safety kit from Volvo

Technology instead of personal responsibility?

By PH Staff / Monday, 31 October 2005 / Loading comments

BLIS with Volvo

Volvo is offering a technology solution aimed at avoiding accidents caused by blind spots.

The new safety system -- BLIS (Blind Spot Information System) -- uses a digital camera system set into both door mirrors. It monitors the area alongside the car for cars or motorbikes, then alerts the driver via an orange light housed in the car's A-pillar by the door mirror. BLIS also works after dark, when it will react to the headlamps of any surrounding vehicles.

Volvo's rationale is that the additional visual information BLIS relays to the driver before changing lanes or overtaking will prove useful.

The company's keen, quite rightly, to make the point that technology cannot relieve drivers of their obligations to make visual checks before manoeuvring, but sees its systems as "an added level of protection against vehicles hovering in the periphery of the driver’s field of vision."

You can turn it off if you want, and Volvo reckoned that it can distinguish between mobile and immobile objects such as parked cars, road barriers, lampposts and other static objects. It should respond only to potentially hazardous moving obstacles, said the company.

But what are the odds that most drivers of BLIS-fitted cars won't bother looking behind them before manoeuvring? That's yet another slice of responsibility for your actions gone...