New Vauxhall Insignia has keen eye for danger

The new Vauxhall Insignia upper-medium saloon will come armed with a two-pronged on-board safety mechanism that’s been developed in-house by the car manufacturer’s own engineers. The ‘Front Camera System’ is primarily a dual alert assemblage that can sense potential road danger before it happens, thanks to its bumper-mounted camera that constantly monitors the on-going carriageway situation as it unfolds directly ahead of the Insignia.

Not much larger than a conventional mobile phone, the ‘Front Camera System’ takes 30 upcoming road pictures every second, prior to the driver experiencing them. This rapid image-capturing lens snaps, processes and develops your candid car camera’s moving images in a moment.

A brace of signal processors have the immediate job of filtering and reading the photos, to determine which are the most important at that time.

The ‘Traffic Sign Recognition’ device is so intelligent it’s able to give an instantaneous I.D of the road speed limit numbers found within circular road-side signage by scanning its exhaustive memory banks until it finds an exact match. The light bulb-pinging moment is then shared with the driver in a trice courtesy of being beaming onto the Insignia’s driver-facing instrumentation panel.

The ‘Front Camera System’ - which Vauxhall has thankfully dubbed it for those who don’t converse in binary - is therefore in essence an ‘all-seeing eye’ which supports the two functional automotive responsibilities. From reading road signs that haven’t yet appeared in the drivers optical range – up to 100 metres distant - and determining the best course of action, the driver should then themselves prioritise this stream of Highway Code-optimised data and act accordingly.

Vauxhall Insignia Lane Departure System

The ‘Lane Departure Warning’ installation on the other hand observes normal traffic lane data that the driver is confronted with as well as, crucially, their habitually-recurring behaviour and reactions to traffic lane changes. This equally forward-thinking assemblage takes into account every nuance in steering inputs and commonplace indicator usage from the word go, so as to definitively form (and therein store) a metaphysical individual driver’s blueprint on the Insignia’s hard-drive.

This knowledge comes into its own if and when any future lane-straying is noted, as from the millisecond driver indifference becomes apparent, the Insignia’s inbuilt system alerts the driver to their normal fluctuation by whatever means it takes. Voice activation accompanied by an illuminated – if not entirely animated – dashboard will grab the drivers attentions and in doing so let the person behind the Insignia’s wheel share its concern.

Ideally suited for drivers with a propensity to nod off behind the wheel, the ‘Lane Departure Warning’ will grab the drivers attention from the dashboard should they suffer even a split-second lapse in concentration. With sharper reflexes and thinking time than an average F1 driver, the ‘Front Camera System’ helps reduce the margin for driver error dramatically on feeding the driver this critical information. And of course, might minimise the fiscal damage caused by speeding fines too.

Available as an option on the forthcoming Vauxhall Insignia as of early 2009, other Griffin-badged models will adopt the safety technology thereafter.