Hate forgetting you left something in your car? Subaru engineers have just come up with a new invention that could help make sure you never do it again. But the system is one of the most complicated ways of doing it that we could imagine.
CarBuzz found a recent patent from Subaru called Vehicle and Item Left Behind Prevention System For Vehicle, and that title does a solid job of describing it. Subaru’s engineers point out in the filing that automakers have tried different ways to detect that you’ve left something in a car and then let you know. One of the company’s own, a since-expired one from 2005, talks about using a camera to compare images of the passenger compartment to help spot items left behind.
This time, Subaru is looking to add to the capabilities of that hypothetical one. The system starts by monitoring where you are. If you’re parked at home and the doors are locked, it will capture an image of the interior of the car.
Then it waits for you to drive the vehicle. The next time you get home, the car checks to see how far you’ve gone. If you’ve gone more than a preset distance, it once again checks for the doors to be locked. Once they’re locked, if you’ve driven far enough, it snaps another image. The system then compares the two images and if there’s anything extra in the second one, it will alert you. Sounds neat, right?
It actually seems quite a limited system, especially for a patent. Subaru’s idea wouldn’t detect anything left if you were stopped somewhere that wasn’t your home, for example. It also needs to have multiple cameras. A driver-facing camera is becoming common, with Subaru’s own EyeSight distraction mitigation monitoring the driver to make sure they’re watching the road. But to see items in the back seat, or on the floor in either the front or back, you’d need at least two more angles.
According to the filing, it waits for you to drive a certain distance to account for situations like loading and unloading. If you’re making trips back to your front door to grab suitcases, the kids, or other stuff, you don’t want the car thinking you’ve left something behind.
The patent says that this idea makes it possible to determine “with high accuracy” if you’ve left something behind. We’re not sure that checks out since it wouldn’t see into center console storage, or the door pockets, or the parts of the floor where valuables inevitably get lost, like near or under the seats.
Of course, since this is a patent, we have no idea when or even if this could make it to a real car. But while you wait, automakers are already offering things like telling you your phone is still in the wireless charger, reminding you to check the back seat if you opened the door during a trip, or using radar sensors to detect kids left in a rear seat. None of which require taking multiple photos of the interior of your car.
Patent filings do not guarantee the use of such technology in future vehicles and are often used exclusively as a means of protecting intellectual property. Such a filing cannot be construed as confirmation of production intent.
Source: USPTO
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