The cars of today aren't just safer than cars of the past. They're also packed to the brim with technologies that would have been considered space-age mere years ago. Here's three of the biggest tech toys of the moment, and the most accessible places to find them. By Matthew Hansen.
Radar cruise control
First pioneered by Mercedes-Benz, radar cruise control managed to take the already handy benefits of ordinary cruise control and make them adaptive. No more switching cruise control on and off every time you got to a slower car on the motorway; instead the car would slow and accelerate by itself to the speed of surrounding traffic.
What started as something exclusively reserved for expensive luxury cars has trickled down into many of the country's most popular vehicles. Each version of Toyota's ever present Corolla comes with standard radar cruise control — as does Suzuki’s $24,990 Swift GLX.
While it may sound more like a luxury feature than a safety feature, advances in cruise control have helped with the improvement of autonomous emergency braking, pedestrian detection and more.
Mobile connectivity
Although cars are getting safer, it’s also true that people are becoming more distracted on the roads.
This is almost entirely down to the advent of the “smart phone” and its multitude of apps. The modern day solution to this is improved integration in a car’s infotainment screen, and this is made possible with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
These help project your car’s key apps on to its touchscreen interface, which in turn can make them controllable via voice recognition. It also allows for a curious mish mash, where a car’s below average standard satnav can be swapped for the use of a superior app such as Google Maps or Waze. Most brands have standardised these systems, with Holden’s excellent $18,990 Spark supermini among the cheapest cars to come with it.
Autonomous parking
Depending on your persuasion, parallel parking is either an enjoyable challenge or the bane of your existence. And though we applaud those positioned in the former, there’s a tech solution out there parallel-phobics, too. The mid-spec $35,490 Holden Astra RS hatch is among the cheapest to offer a self-parking system, with others including the Ford Focus Titanium and Toyota Prius Prime. Cars featuring this system will be able to use sensors to scan spaces next to a kerb to find a gap that’s large enough. Once a gap is found some systems will shift the car autonomously from drive to reverse, while others require the driver to make shifts and control throttle. All systems, however, will control steering inputs for the perfect park every time.