After two years of intensive development conducted under the project name APIA (Active Passive Integration Approach), we are now preparing our ground-breaking system for production readiness. In view of the excellent potentials for the future, we felt that these developments should now be known by an appropriate name – a catchy name that clearly expresses the value of these technologies to the world of the automobile. We present:

ContiGuard – our contribution toward the best possible protection of road users.

ContiGuard is our solution to more intelligent vehicles that help prevent accidents and reduce the risk of injury for vehicle occupants and pedestrians to a minimum. With ContiGuard, we are a big step closer to our ambitious goal: Vision Zero – a traffic situation in which people are so well protected that road deaths and serious injuries no longer occur. ContiGuard embraces the networking of active and passive safety systems and the integration of environmental sensors and Telematics. ContiGuard therefore stands for automobiles that can communicate with each other and with the infrastructure and exchange safety information.

*Reversible Seatbelt Pretensioners in cooperation with Takata-Petri

The heart of the system con-sists of a safety control module that in every traffic situation calculates the probability of an accident and initiates appropriate, staged responses that prevent an accident completely or, if this is not possible, mitigates the effect of an accident.

Many significant advantages of ContiGuard are already usable:

• Significantly reduced stopping distance
• Extensive protection from injury of vehicle occupants and pedestrians involved
• Extended, optimized functionality through system integration
• Efficient accident prevention or reduction of accident severity

In parallel to preparing for series production of ContiGuard, we are constantly striving to improve performance through integration of further system components. The concept was specifically designed for this ongoing development and therefore offers excellent potentials for the future. Current activities aimed at increasing performance are based on extended environmental monitoring and steering intervention: The latest camera and radar systems monitor the sides and rear of the car. If a vehicle following behind moves into the critical zone, the driver receives in stages firstly a visual, then an acoustic and finally a haptic warning of dangerous lane-changing maneuvers. If he is still unable to avoid an accident, ContiGuard prepares the passive safety systems of the vehicle for a possible collision and controls the deployment of the airbags. A further CMOS camera near the rear-view mirror monitors lane markings and traffic signs, e.g. for lane keeping functions.

The future with ContiGuard

Combining the camera sensor with distance sensors enables better evaluation of the traffic situation. By classifying other road users, image processing systems will in future also enable emergency braking intervention in response to stationary obstacles such as traffic jam ends. In particular, however, fantastic chances are opened up by the integration of functions of our dynamically growing Telematics technology (communication between vehicles and with the infrastructure), reaching up to the “Ecall” – an automatic emergency call giving location, time stamp and damage analysis.

Further information about ContiGuard for download:

Toward the Accident and Injury-preventing Car with ContiGuard - German and English (PDF, 1,0 MB)

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