After learning that the all-new Cadillac can squeeze in four adults with all their golf gear, General Motors is now informing us about an innovative safety feature that will make its debut on the full-size sedan when it launches later this Spring.
The patented Cadillac Safety Alert Seat is an industry first system that uses directional tactile sensation, or to put it in Layman’s terms, the driver’s seat base vibrates, to warn of crash threats while driving and parking.
More specifically, GM tells us that the system generates vibrating pulse patterns on the left and/or the right side of the lower bolster to alert the driver of potential dangers including drifting from a traffic lane or toward nearby objects while parking. If the threat comes from the front or the rear of the car, then both sides of the seat will pulsate.
“It’s akin to someone tapping on your shoulder in a crowd to get your attention,” says GM Active Safety Technical Fellow Raymond Kiefer. “Using the tactile sense to communicate crash threat direction provides an effective and intuitive way to cut through the clutter of visual and auditory sensory information that drivers routinely experience.”
Kiefer added that GM’s research suggests that the vibrating seat may direct driver attention to the location of a crash threat faster and more accurately than audio or visual alerts.
The vibrating seats will be part of the Driver Awareness and Driver Assist packages for the XTS, while they will also become available in the ATS sedan and SRX crossover later this year.
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