Ford Park-Assist will be Available on the Lincoln MKS Crossover this Summer
Active Park Assist, originally uploaded by Ford Motor Company
You know kiddies, when I was a kid we used to walk to school. We would travel up hill for 10 miles through blizzard or tornado, just to learn our arithmetic. When we got home we had to catch our own supper, which was generally either grizzly bear or crocodile. When my parents went to the store, we would have to push the car the whole 20 miles because we couldn’t afford an engine in those days. Then once we finally got there, our parents had to parallel park their own car… did you hear that? Parallel Park their own freaking car!
Ford has announced that it will be introducing their new New Park-Assist with their Lincoln MKS Crossover next summer. Assisted park technology is nothing new really. It has already been introduced on a few vehicles, such as Lexus, and may soon become a part of Volkswagen, albeit in a much more complex design that will not only park itself, but drop you off at the front door and then pick you up. Sheesh, does it get any lazier… we think not!
The way the Ford system works, is the driver still controls the accelerator and brake, but the vehicle will control the steering through a system of ultrasonic sensors placed within the bumpers. These sensors will be able to “see” the vehicles it is being parked between, and guide the driver smoothly into the space without worry of bumper rash. The system will also keep track of oncoming traffic, which is another nice feature when you are dealing with a busy city block.
While Ford probably assumed that most of its customers would be excited to hear that they are free from yet another daily activity in life, they had another pot of good news to share with us. It turns out that the new system will also boost fuel economy by about 5 percent during the typical drive. How it does this, is instead of using the engine to run the belt-driven hydraulic steering pump, it uses an electric steering mechanism. This gives the system the benefit of zero leeching off the vehicles available torque and horsepower.
What will they think up next?
January 6th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
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