When I ignored a flashed visual warning inside the car, the Volvo braked itself forcefully and left Bob unscathed, stopping with about a foot to spare even when I was sure the dummy was toast.
As the anticipated time-to-impact decreases, CMS prepares the car for sudden braking by moving the brake pads nearer to the brake disks, and finally, when the system concludes that a collision is less than one second away, it starts to apply the brakes itself.
It works a bit like an advanced form of Cruise Control, but you tell a driverless car the destination address of your journey and it is able to brake by itself, change lanes, and make turns to get you there.
At slower speeds on open roads, a feature called Congestion Assist steers, accelerates and brakes by itself.
The safety agency says it decided to investigate after receiving 22 complaints from Odyssey owners saying "that the vehicle suddenly applies the brakes by itself," according to a report posted Saturday on the N.H.T.S.A. Web site.
Then he asked: "What is it about this industry, which has such talent and such an obligation to the global environment and to highway safety, that it is constantly putting the brakes on itself unless it is dragged kicking and screaming by government regulators or lawsuits?" Silence.
I make my way to the highway, then once I get above the car's minimum speed for cruise control (roughly 35 mph), I set that and let the car do the accelerating and braking by itself.
Pluto's gravity is so weak that it would take a huge amount of fuel for a spacecraft to brake and put itself into orbit.
The star nearest Earth's solar system, Alpha Centauri, is 4.37 light years away, or more than 2.5tn miles, and a round-trip spacecraft would have to carry enough fuel to brake and propel itself back to Earth.
But certainly the S-Class, which can also park itself, brake automatically to avoid hitting humans or other cars and sense when a driver is becoming fatigued, is a further evolution of systems intended to relieve some of the tedium of driving.
