South and Southeast Asia Brake Conference and Exhibition 2020

Braking issues in the real world: a perspective of road safety

Zulhaidi M Jawi - Senior research officer, Malaysian institute of road safety research (miros)

We need the brake in vehicle to bring it to a halt, or to reduce speed while travelling. While the concept is rather simple, what happens in the real world is a totally different story. Philosophically, we allow human to operate road vehicle (“the machine”) without so much restrictions or control as in the aviation industry or even in maritime. Humans are weak when they are exposed to power (speeding over the limit), easily get distracted, and being too optimistic and over confident. All these bad qualities in the road safety system originating from human have made the system not sustainably safe. The inventions on braking technologies today are actually responding to the above mentioned problems, and this includes the idea to have autonomous vehicle. The available technologies are centered on the effort to overcome the weaknesses of human beings, e.g. to assist drivers to brake on time, to estimate and reduce headway distance, etc. It is predicted that in the (near?) future, humans do not need to drive a vehicle; hence, the future of braking technologies should no longer consider human factors in the entire design.