More news on the collision avoidance assistance front, but this time, it has to do with animals – Volvo is developing a system that alerts and automatically brakes for animals on the road.

With thousands of motorists across the globe killed in accidents caused by collisions with wild animals each year, the aim of the project is to develop a safety system that reduces the risk of collisions with said wild animals. The new system is based on technologies from Pedestrian Detection with Full Auto Brake and will be launched on the market in a few years’ time, Volvo says.

The system consists of two parts – a radar sensor and an infra-red camera that can register the traffic situation. The camera monitors the road ahead and if an animal is within range the system alerts the driver with an audible signal. If the driver doesn’t react, the brakes are automatically applied.

As the majority of accidents with animals occur at dusk or after nightfall, it’s essential for the system to function in the dark. The goal, of course, is for the system to function at the normal rural highway speeds, as opposed to the current pedestrian detection system which operates at low speeds, specifically for city usage.

The challenge being faced by the engineers is how to ‘teach’ the system to recognise different animals. A development team from Volvo spent time at a safari park digitally logging film sequences of animals and their various behavioral patterns, focusing on moose, red deer and fallow deer. By driving very slowly along a trail where fodder had been laid out to attract the animals, data was recorded and this will be used to evaluate and develop the sensor system.

In the first stage, the system will respond to large animals that risk injuring the driver or passengers in an impact, such as moose, deer and reindeer. There’s good reason for going with the trio – in Sweden alone, more than 47,000 accidents involving wild animals took place in 2010, 7,000 of them with moose.

The company says that the greatest danger is from collisions with a moose, or Eurasian elk, if you prefer. In an impact with an Alces alces, there’s a relatively high risk of personal injury, since it’s common for the animal to end up on or roll across the front of the car and its windscreen.

The project has been under way for just over a year, though a lot of work still remains to be done. Various technologies are currently being evaluated and software is being developed. And while the system “learns” to recognise various animals, development is also under way on the necessary decision-making mechanisms, which is how and when the protective system is activated to respond.

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Volvo is set to test a new system called Flywheel KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System), which it claims will make a four-cylinder engine feel like a six-cylinder and at the same time reduce fuel consumption by up to 20%. The company has received a 6.57 million Swedish kronor grant from the Swedish Energy Agency for development, in a joint project together with Volvo Powertrain and SKF.

The Flywheel KERS is fitted to the rear axle – during retardation, the braking energy causes the flywheel to spin at up to 60,000 revs per minute, and when the car starts moving off again, the flywheel’s rotation is transferred to the rear wheels via a specially designed transmission.

The combustion engine that drives the front wheels is switched off as soon as the braking begins – the energy in the flywheel can be used to accelerate the vehicle or to power the vehicle once it reaches cruising speed.

The flywheel’s stored energy is sufficient to power the car for short periods. How it will have a major impact on fuel consumption is this: based on calculations, the combustion engine will be able to be turned off about half the time when driving in a New European Driving Cycle mode.

Since the flywheel is activated by braking, and the duration of the energy storage (the length of time the flywheel spins) is limited, the technology is at its most effective during driving featuring repeated stops and starts, which means busy urban traffic.

Combining the flywheel’s energy with the combustion engine’s full capacity promises a significant boost in horsepower, and with swift torque build-up in attendance, this translates into rapid acceleration.

The flywheel – which spins in a vacuum to minimise frictional losses – that Volvo will use in its test car is made of carbon fibre, and weighs about 6 kg with a diameter of 20 cm. It’s not the first time flywheel propulsion assistance has been tested by the company – a Volvo 240 also did so back in the 1980s, but the heavy steel-based flywheel wasn’t very efficient.

Volvo also isn’t the first manufacturer to test flywheel technology, but it is in applying it to the rear axle of a car fitted with a combustion engine driving the front wheels. If the tests and technical development go as planned, expect cars with flywheel technology to reach the showrooms within a few years, the company says.