"Oi! Wake up!" With a roll-up stuck to her lip, and her wig over one eye, my partner nudges me awake each morning with her walking stick. "Get up," she urges, "It's 'arf pass ten, and the goat wants feedin." I've asked her not to refer to my mother in that way but charm is not one of her strong points.
On the other hand, the Lexus 600h wakes you up with a polite buzz and a dab of the brakes. Well, not so much wakes you up, as alerts you: alerts you to an obstruction ahead of the car, which it knows you are unlikely to have seen as you were looking in the wing mirror at the time. It does so by monitoring your face through a camera mounted on the steering column, and if it detects that your head has turned by more than 15 degrees away from the road at the same time as stereo cameras pick up an obstruction ahead, the system alerts you in the manner described.
This so-called Driver Monitoring System (DMS) is just one of the many active safety devices that make the extraordinarily complex Lexus 600h even more extraordinary. The DMS proximity sensors employ near-infra-red wavelengths, which means that they also work at night, and are sensitive enough to detect pedestrians and animals.
Elements of this system also contribute to the Adaptive Cruise Control, which has been developed to the point where it now works in stop-start traffic. In those conditions, it can bring the vehicle to a complete standstill, and restart it when the car ahead moves off. Thankfully, the range is adjustable, so you can prevent its allowing a Transit to slip into the gap. Even so, I found the slight hesitation a little disconcerting.
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The 5.0-litre V8 engine is every bit as complex as the car it powers |
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The sensors are also linked to the Advanced Obstacle Detection System (AODS), which, in turn, forms part of the Pre-Crash Safety System (PCS). If AODS detects a hazard in front of the vehicle, PCS measures the position, speed and trajectory of the obstacle to determine the collision potential. If a crash seems likely, PCS pre-tensions the brakes, changes the steering ratio to exaggerate steering input, and stiffens the suspension.
All of this comes under the watchful eye of the Vehicle Dynamics Integrated Management (VDIM) system, which, says Lexus, is unique in that it can perform several interventions simultaneously, whereas other mechatronic systems can handle only one intervention at a time and therefore take longer to respond. In short, VDIM does everything in its considerable computing power to stop your having a crash.
And no matter how complex this all may seem, I can assure you that I have spared you the finer detail.
Yet fine detail underwrites the whole Lexus ethos. The 5.0-litre V8 engine is every bit as complex as the car it powers, and is assembled and tested in a manner that makes Volkswagen's fabled detailmeister seem comparatively slapdash. For example, an engineer listens to each and every engine with a stethoscope in order to ensure that there are no abnormal noises. And an accelerometer is used to measure the crankshaft speed at either end to check for torsional twist under heavy acceleration. And forget measuring tolerances to the nearest thou': a computer checks to the nearest micron - that's a millionth of a metre, or 0.000001m.
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