With over 500 confirmed orders – and over 400 having already been delivered – the Proton X70 is set to become one of the official vehicles for Public Sector Super Scale (JUSA) officers. The decision by the Malaysian government and SPANCO (the fleet management service provider for the government) to order the SUV for its fleet is an important achievement for Proton.
The X70’s role as an official government vehicle was strengthened recently when a unit of the SUV was delivered to the Ministry of Finance for Dato’ Shahrol Anuwar Sarman, Statutory Bodies Division Secretary for the Strategic Management Division.
From left: Fazli Hisham Shukor, Director of Proton Corporate Sales, and Hazrin Fazail Haroon, Director of Proton Group Engineering at the handover of the X70 to Dato’ Shahrol Anuwar Sarman, Statutory Bodies Division Secretary for the Strategic Management Division of Ministry of Finance, accompanied by Shaheeran Jalalludin, Operations Head of SPANCO.
While the delivery was of a single unit of the X70, the significance of the event is expected to have far wider consequences. “The Proton X70 has been an invaluable contributor to PROTON’s success in 2019 so we are proud it now plays a formal role for the public services sector. This proves its suitability for a number of tasks including representing various ministries at local and international level events. We are also therefore expecting to receive more orders for the Proton X70 from various government departments in 2020,” said Dr. Li Chunrong, Chief Executive Officer of Proton.
Earlier in December, it was announced a fleet of Proton X70s would be used to support the year-long Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) 2020 forum. This should provide good exposure for the model as well as Proton at a major international event.
“Proton will continue to work closely with service providers such as SPANCO to ensure we can support the need for official vehicles by public sector agencies and government departments. As a Malaysian automotive brand, we want to continue to show our support for the country and play a role in nation building,” Dr. Li said.
On January 1, 2020, the new law on compulsory usage of child restraint systems (CRS) comes into effect. This complements an earlier law requiring all occupants in the vehicle to use the seatbelts and now, small children who cannot use such restraint systems must be placed in childseats.
There are grumbles about the cost of getting childseats, especially for those with many children – not uncommon in Malaysia. The government is looking into solutions for such cases but stands by its position that the law will still be implemented even though it may be an unpopular move. The benefits in reducing deaths is significant enough that the government is willing to ‘take the heat’.
Installation of childseats should be in the rear; placing them at the front passenger’s seat should be only be done if really necessary. And apart from ensuring that they are installed securely (the ISOFIX points in most modern vehicles ensure this), having them facing rearwards is better.
Fact: small children highly vulnerable in car accidents
To understand why the rearward-facing position is better, we need to look back at the history of childseats. For a long time, it had been observed by automobile safety researchers that small children were highly vulnerable in car accidents. Although 3-point seatbelts were available, they were not suitable because of the smaller size of children.
In 1964, using the same idea that protected astronauts from the effects of the tremendous g-forces experienced during a rocket’s lift-off into space, Professor Bertil Aldman in Sweden designed a rearward-facing childseat.
The purpose of this seat was to distribute the forces of a frontal collision over a large part of the child’s body, ie the entire back, neck and head, and also to provide support to the spine during the course of an accident.
The way the seat was constructed and installed was particularly important for small children as a conventional forward-facing restraint system would not provide sufficient support to the child’s unproportionally large head and a neck that was still fairly weak compared to an adult’s.
ISOFIX points (left) are usually found in the rear seats and enable the childseats to be easily and securely installed.
Strict regulations
By the end of the 1960s, the first rearward-facing child seat became available and was intended for children between 9 months and 4 years old. In 1973, new regulations were introduced in Sweden pertaining to the approval of CRS and were so stringent that only those with a rearward-facing design could be approved by the authorities.
Researchers at Volvo began compiling data on the way children (of up to 4 years old) were restrained in cars and there was some evidence of benefits. However, up till the end of the 1970s, awareness of the value of CRS was still not great so statistics were insufficient.
The 1980s, however, seen a rapid rise in childseat usage and virtually all small children travelling in cars in Sweden were properly restrained. Part of the reason for the increased usage by parents was also due to the campaigns to make people aware of the importance of restraint systems for adults and children, something which the authorities in Malaysia have been carrying out.
Improper usage of childseats
Studies have shown that there are two major ways that parents have misused CRS, both of which are dangerous. The child may not be restrained properly or be in a seat that is not the right type for his or her age or worse, the child seat is not mounted correctly, or the child is not restrained in the seat at all.
If a child is not restrained properly in a child seat, the forces during an accident can send him or her flyting around the cabin and sustain serious injuries. In an extreme situation – and there have been cases reported – the child may even be ejected through the window.
A correctly-used child seat can help to reduce the risk of fatal injuries by approximately 70% but for a partially-misused child seat (eg wrong size), the reduction is approximately 40% only.
From Volvo’s own investigations of thousands of accidents involving its own vehicles with children in them, the most common type of misuse was found to be that the seat was not fitted according to the instructions. In two cases, the child seat was wrongly fitted facing forward and one of these two cases saw the child sustaining fatal head injuries when the roof intruded into the compartment where the child was seated (but it is not clear whether the child was restrained or not).
Various other studies at the time did not provide reliable conclusions regarding the difference in outcomes between rearward-facing childseats but there was a feeling that they were more ‘positive’ than the corresponding number of forward-facing seats. Over time, as more data was collected, it was increasingly obvious that children in rearward-facing childseats have had the lowest risk of injury (from slight to serious injuries).
An examination of the types of injuries sustained showed that only 5% those in rearward-facing child seats had head injuries whereas 18% of the unrestrained children suffered such injuries. In every case, the highest percentage of injuries was experienced by children without any form of restraint. They are also likely to have injuries to their limbs.
When the children get bigger and taller, they require booster seats that raise their body so it will put them in the correct position to use the seatbelts.
It is interesting to note, however, that those on the booster cushion/seat had relatively high rates of neck and chest injuries, which suggests that the wrong positioning of the seatbelt could have been the cause.
How do the children feel?
In promoting the use of rearward-facing child seats, it is also important to understand how the little users feel. However, the studies undertaken have shown adult attitudes which might not accurately reflect the real experiences of the children.
In one study, observations were made regarding how adults and children travelled. It showed that 66% of all children — but only 25% of all adults — preferred to sit with their backs against the direction of travel. Adults seemed to have a resistance towards travelling backwards so there is a possibility that they may have a misconception regarding the experience of the child.
Various studies suggest that the greatest problem in connection with the use of the childseat is that the child does not like it preventing him or her from moving around, especially during long trips. This is not peculiar to rearward-facing seats as a similar problem, with the same magnitude, would also be the case with forward-facing seats. To overcome this, it is suggested that the child be allowed to see and communicate with others in the car; if the driver is alone, the seat can be installed in the front seat where the child can see another person.
Rearward-facing or forward-facing, investigations of many accidents all over the world have shown the importance of proper CRS in preventing a child from being ejected from the car if it should roll over or tumble down the side of a slope.
While housewives may be able to limit their driving as their pregnancy progresses, there are many women who will still be driving to work daily. During this journey to parenthood (if it’s the first time), mothers-to-be need to continuously make in-vehicle adjustments to ensure optimal positioning and safety while driving.
To help engineers better understand the needs of expectant mothers, Ford Motor Company designed an ‘empathy belly’ – or pregnancy suit. This maternity suit adds an extra 13.6 kgs of weight (the average weight gained during pregnancy) and simulates the bulkiness and discomfort of the third trimester of pregnancy, helping engineers design vehicles that enable expectant mothers – and a broad range of drivers – to make necessary adjustments that support safe driving.
Based on insights gained from wearing the empathy belly, here are top tips from Ford to further help women drivers on the road to motherhood.
Seatbelt safety
Ensure the seatbelt has a snug fit. Pull the seatbelt over the shoulder, between the breasts and to the side of the belly. The lap portion of the belt should be located at the hip, and below – not across – the abdomen, making sure it lies as flat as possible under the curve of the belly. Never put the shoulder belt behind or under the arm, as this can cause serious injury in the event of an accident.
Make proper vehicle adjustments
Move the seat back to a comfortable distance from the pedals, ideally sitting about 25 cm away from the steering wheel, to protect the abdomen if the airbag deploys in a frontal collision. If the car’s steering wheel is adjustable, point the centre of the steering wheel away from the belly and toward the chest. After changing the seat position, be sure to adjust the rearview and outside mirrors. Should backaches occur, place a small round pillow or rolled towel behind the lower back to improve comfort while driving.
From snack attacks…to nausea
Food cravings (and ‘morning’ sickness) can happen at any time of day. Be sure to pack plenty of water and favourite snacks to satisfy those cravings. Keep extra ‘nausea bags’ in the purse and glovebox. And always avoid distracted driving – pull over to a safe place when hunger or sickness strikes.
Have a rest… or avoid driving
The ‘pregnant brain’ endures more strain than usual, so map out trips in advance (use Waze to see how long the journey might take). Avoid driving long distances if possible, and take frequent breaks to promote blood circulation in the feet, since feet and ankles swell more easily when sitting for extended periods of time. So take a break, and stretch and move the legs, feet and toes.
Better still – avoid driving when possible. For expectant mothers, the middle rear seat is the safest place in a car (as long as it offers a shoulder and lap belt). But if seated in the front passenger seat, push it back as far as possible to protect the abdomen if the airbag deploys.
Shop for a childseat
Once the baby has arrived, a childseat will be necessary and an infant seat will be the type to use during the first 2 years. After that, depending on the speed of growth, a bigger seat will be needed. Unless really necessary, the childseat should be installed at the back instead of the front passenger’s seat. A small wide-angle ‘baby mirror’ can be installed on the ceiling so the driver can watch the back without having to turn around frequently.
The age of autonomous cars – vehicles that can operate without human control – is coming. It’s not charging at us but with the amount of investment and R&D going into such technology, there will come a time when the companies are ready to sell autonomous vehicles. The introduction won’t be global, just as electric vehicles are not sold everywhere even though they have reached commercialisation.
While autonomous technologies have improved substantially, they still ultimately view the drivers around them as obstacles made up of ones and zeros, rather than human beings with specific intentions, motivations, and personalities. For all their fancy sensors and intricate data-crunching abilities, even the most cutting-edge cars lack something that (almost) every teenager with a ‘P’ licence has: social awareness.
A team led by researchers at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been exploring whether self-driving cars can be programmed to classify the social personalities of other drivers. This could help them better predict what different cars will do — and, therefore, be able to drive more safely among them.
In a new paper, the scientists integrated tools from social psychology to classify driving behaviour with respect to how selfish or selfless a particular driver is. Specifically, they used something called social value orientation (SVO), which represents the degree to which someone is selfish (‘egoistic’) versus altruistic or cooperative (‘prosocial’). The system then estimates drivers’ SVOs to create real-time driving trajectories for self-driving cars.
Testing their algorithm on the tasks of merging lanes and making unprotected turns to the left (on US roads where vehicles travel on the right), the team showed that they could better predict the behaviour of other cars by a factor of 25%. For example, in the left-turn simulations, their car knew to wait when the approaching car had a more egoistic driver, and to then make the turn when the other car was more ‘prosocial’.
While not yet robust enough to be implemented on real roads, the system could have some intriguing use cases, and not just for the cars that drive themselves. Say you’re a human driving along and a car suddenly enters your blind spot — the system could give you a warning in the rear-view mirror that the car has an aggressive driver, allowing you to adjust accordingly. It could also allow self-driving cars to actually learn to exhibit more human-like behaviour that will be easier for human drivers to understand.
Mercedes-Benz researchers have taken prototype autonomous vehicles through various cities around the world to collect data on driving conditions and drivers so as to improve the ‘intelligence’ of the cars.
“Working with and around humans means figuring out their intentions to better understand their behaviour,” said graduate student Wilko Schwarting, who was lead author on the new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “People’s tendencies to be collaborative or competitive often spills over into how they behave as drivers. In this paper, we sought to understand if this was something we could actually quantify.”
Schwarting’s co-authors included MIT professors Sertac Karaman and Daniela Rus, as well as research scientist Alyssa Pierson and former CSAIL postdoc Javier Alonso-Mora.
A central issue with today’s self-driving cars is that they’re programmed to assume that all humans act the same way. This means that, among other things, they’re quite conservative in their decision-making at 4-way stops and other intersections. While this caution reduces the chance of fatal accidents, it also creates bottlenecks that can be frustrating for other drivers, not to mention hard for them to understand. This may be why the majority of traffic incidents have involved getting rear-ended by impatient drivers.
“Creating more human-like behaviour in autonomous vehicles (AVs) is fundamental for the safety of passengers and surrounding vehicles, since behaving in a predictable manner enables humans to understand and appropriately respond to the AV’s actions,” said Schwarting.
To try to expand the car’s social awareness, the CSAIL team combined methods from social psychology with game theory, a theoretical framework for conceiving social situations among competing players. The team modeled road scenarios where each driver tried to maximize their own utility and analyzed their ‘best responses’ given the decisions of all other agents.
Based on that small snippet of motion from other cars, the team’s algorithm could then predict the surrounding cars’ behaviour as cooperative, altruistic, or egoistic — grouping the first two as ‘prosocial’. People’s scores for these qualities rest on a continuum with respect to how much a person demonstrates care for themselves versus care for others.
In the merging and left-turn scenarios, the two outcome options were to either let somebody merge into your lane (‘prosocial’) or not (‘egoistic’). The team’s results showed that, not surprisingly, merging cars are deemed more competitive than non-merging cars.
The system was trained to try to better understand when it’s appropriate to exhibit different behaviours. For example, even the most deferential of human drivers knows that certain types of actions — like making a lane-change in heavy traffic — require a moment of being more assertive and decisive.
“By modeling driving personalities and incorporating the models mathematically using the SVO in the decision-making module of a robot car, this work opens the door to safer and more seamless road-sharing between human-driven and robot-driven cars,” said Rus.
In the context of Malaysian traffic conditions, such advanced intelligent technology may well be valuable in addressing the unpredictability of the many motorcyclists which ride between cars. Of course, it will require extremely quick processing for the autonomous car to respond and react in time to avoid a collision.
The research was supported by the Toyota Research Institute for the MIT team. The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research provided support for the specific participation of Mora.
Following the announcement of Pirelli as the sole tyre-supplier for the World Rally Championship (WRC) from 2021, the FIA has also announced that Goodyear’s tender for supplying tyres to the WTCR – FIA World Touring Car Cup has been accepted. The tyremaker will be the official tyre supplier for the series over the next 3 years, covering the 2020-2022 seasons.
The 2020 WTCR season has 10 races on three continents including races in Morocco, Hungary, Germany, Slovakia, Portugal, Spain, China, South Korea and Macau, with Malaysia hosting the finale. The events are triple-header races, resulting in a 30-round highly competitive race calendar.
Eagle F1 SuperSport racing tyres
Goodyear will supply its latest generation of Eagle F1 SuperSport racing tyres in both slick and wet specifications, beginning with the 2020 WTCR season opener in Marrakech in April.
The WTCR – FIA World Touring Car Cup is promoted by Discovery-owned Eurosport Events and administered by the FIA. Its high appeal to spectators is because the cars are racing versions of high-performance production models from brands such as Alfa Romeo, Audi, Cupra, Honda, Hyundai and Lynk & Co.
“Goodyear has a long and successful history in motorsport and we are very proud it has chosen the WTCR as an international racing flagship. Discovery and Goodyear will be very active together all year long to reconnect that iconic brand into the racing community with quality content and a full range of very creative activations. We have no doubt that Goodyear will be a first-class partner on the technical and marketing fronts of WTCR,” said François Ribeiro, Head of Eurosport Events, the WTCR promoter.
Long history in top-level motorsport
Goodyear has a long history in top-level motorsport, winning 368 Formula One GPs, more than any other tyre manufacturer. The FIA WTCR contract rekindles memories of Goodyear’s race-winning heritage in the European Touring Car Championship, a forerunner of WTCR, in the 1970s and 1980s. In recent years, Goodyear has been the sole supplier of tyres to NASCAR and announced its comeback into global motorsport earlier this year, supplying tyres to the FIA World Endurance Championship and European Le Mans Series.
“We are excited to be joining Eurosport and the FIA by becoming the official tyre supplier for the FIA WTCR. This complements our recent comeback into global motorsport through the FIA World Endurance Championship. It allows Goodyear to connect with fans in a wide range of countries, and also prove the performance of our Goodyear Eagle F1 SuperSport range of racing tyres,” said Mike Rytokoski, Vice-President & Chief Marketing Officer, Goodyear Consumer Europe.
