I agree with you that this may not be revolutionary, but with some relatively realistic numbers (1300 kg lead car, a giant 1500 kg moose, 80kph road speed, 6m following distance, 7m/s^2 max decel of following vehicles), it looks like you'd only have the first two or three cars collide, and probably not hard enough to cause life threatening injuries in the second car. I'd think that tuning the following distance to the road speed (and, possibly more morbidly, the mass of the lead car relative to the foreseeable obstacles, which I'm not entirely sure that Volvo wasn't tacitly doing in the test) would be adequate to come up with a safe following distance well shorter than 2 seconds, where fuel economy gains obviously kick in as well.
The practical reaction time for mid-cruise humans is pretty terrifyingly slow sometimes. Pair that with suboptimal panic behavior and I believe that there's some significant efficiency and maybe even safety gains to be made. Granted, there is a limit.
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I agree with you that this may not be revolutionary, but with some relatively realistic numbers (1300 kg lead car, a giant 1500 kg moose, 80kph road speed, 6m following distance, 7m/s^2 max decel of following vehicles), it looks like you'd only have the first two or three cars collide, and probably not hard enough to cause life threatening injuries in the second car. I'd think that tuning the following distance to the road speed (and, possibly more morbidly, the mass of the lead car relative to the foreseeable obstacles, which I'm not entirely sure that Volvo wasn't tacitly doing in the test) would be adequate to come up with a safe following distance well shorter than 2 seconds, where fuel economy gains obviously kick in as well.
The practical reaction time for mid-cruise humans is pretty terrifyingly slow sometimes. Pair that with suboptimal panic behavior and I believe that there's some significant efficiency and maybe even safety gains to be made. Granted, there is a limit.