(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Among all those techno goodies like lane departure warning and automatic braking, some are actually capable of helping a driver in ways they cannot help themselves. Ford’s Pedestrian Detection system, for example, aims to help you see in the dark. Well, see pedestrians at night anyway.
Effectively, what we have here is a way to use on-board sensors that are already in place to do other things like look for, sense, and react to wandering pedestrians. In some ways, this strikes me as a good thing.
There are a ton of news stories out there about pedestrians too distracted by their smartphones, wandering obliviously into traffic and getting wham-o-ed into The Great Beyond.
Night Moves Ford goes into great detail why, in the dark especially, this is not only difficult for even the most attentive drivers to counter, but also plays on the inherent fears built into our primitive brains. Ford says “night fears rooted in our pre-historic past cause stress behind the wheel,” and a new poll shows most people “worry about night blindness and many fear hitting pedestrians.”
And all of that makes sense, especially from a psycho-anthropological standpoint. And that’s Ford’s nice way of saying, “the stuff that scared the jeepers out of our Troglodytic ancestors still scares us.” So, yeah, fear handed down from cavemen causes stress on the road, and so does that Neanderthal in front ...