Most concept vehicles are outlandish things, design sketches come to gleaming life for a single auto-show season. They prove that automakers have dreams, too, even if the bold lines and glittering gadgetry of those dreams are inevitably dumbed down into more practical products. But some of the most high-tech features available today — the kind that have turned the modern automobile into a rolling sensor suite and that can take control of the vehicle during driving and parking — made their debut in concept vehicles. Here are five of the best technological innovations that made it to production, and five more that we'd like to see in the future.
INNOVATIONS WE CAN USE ...
Self-Parking
Though far from standard, the car that parks itself is headed toward ubiquity, thanks in no small part to the Integrated Research Volkswagen Concept, which debuted in 1992. This precursor to today's city-car concepts could maneuver itself into a parallel-parking spot by using front- and rear-mounted sensors to track obstacles. It would be more than a decade before this capability hit the market, beginning with the Lexus LS 460 in 2006, and then with VW's own Touran that same year.
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Blind-Spot Detection
Before automakers could engineer vehicles to brake and steer themselves, they had to give them eyes, ears and a dash of ultrasound and radar, all to increase drivers' awareness of their surroundings. That strategy came to a head in the Volvo Safety Concept Car, which pioneered — among other things — blind-spot detection. When it debuted in 2000, the SCC may have seemed a little too safe, with its transparent A-pillars, multiple collision warnings and flashing brake lights, which were meant to provide additional warning to other drivers when braking hard. Objects in the vehicle's blind spot would trigger a light on side mirrors, and eventually a tone. This basic concept has seen widespread adoption in recent years. Starting in 2010, Nissan took the inevitable step from sensing to acting: The Infiniti M automatically brakes to avoid drifting into a detected blind-spot obstruction.
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Lane Departure
The terminology surrounding lane-departure systems is humble and downplays what's really being offered — the quasi-robotic ability of a vehicle to steer itself at highway speeds. The Volvo Safety Concept Car can't take full credit for introducing this technology, since by 2001 cameras that watch for suspicious, unsignaled lane shifts had already been installed in trucks and buses. Also in 2001, Nissan released its own lane-departure alarm system in the Cima, sold only in Japan. But Volvo framed its feature as part of a larger sensor-based safety initiative, and by 2003, Honda's Inspire was actively steering to fight lane drift. In the years since, nearly every automaker has rolled out its own version, though most still use cameras to spot lanes and vibrations to alert the driver, instead of wresting control of the wheel.
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Pedestrian Detection
It should be no surprise that many safety-based features first appeared in Volvo concepts. In 2008, the company presented its S60 Concept, which featured collision-detection systems that not only spotted pedestrians moving into the vehicle's path, but also applied the brakes to avoid or minimize impact. At speeds less than 15 mph, the S60 would try to come to full stop. When traveling faster, it slowed down, and Volvo claimed that the collision force could be reduced by 75 percent. This technology is just hitting the showroom today, along with more hands-off approaches, such as night-vision cameras that highlight pedestrians and deliver audible collision alerts.
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Voice Control
The design teams behind most concept cars look no more than five or 10 years ahead. In 2002, in a partnership with the movie "Minority Report," Lexus created a vehicle design for 2054. Along with the ability to latch onto magnetic-levitation tracks and recognize the driver's DNA, the Lexus 2054 could respond to voice commands, changing the color of its body panels or searching for restaurants and making reservations. Ordering your car to turn candy-apple red is still science fiction, but by 2007, Ford's Sync infotainment system was turning basic smartphone functions into voice commands. Today, speech recognition is as common as factory-installed GPS navigation.
