Flushing JourneyIntroduction:
I was in a tour going to flushing from New York City to Flushing, Queens, (close to Shea Stadium as the place of American Open and NY Mets) where a lot of Chinese people live in. We drove a car, heading Chinese mall with Chinese market and food court to buy Chinese snack and enjoy a big meal.
On the way to Flushing, I take some time playing with all the marvelous device originally installed on vehicle. In the central console, I saw the air conditioning system which include a thermo sensor, to detect the temperature inside the car, and command the other part of air conditioning system to adjust the temperature to the one set by passenger. the thermo sensor is installed below the indoor back mirror, where the height is not far from the height of passengers head, which is a reasonable height setting. The air conditioning system work well on the trip and supposedly the sensor work well as well.
The second sensor I found on the car is the anti-pinch window sensor. While you press the button to lift up the window in order to close it, the anti-pinch function would be activated to detect if the window closing process counter any resistant. If the resistant is a little bit to high, obviously there is potential risk, a possibility that passenger's body might be pinched and then cause injury. So if the resistant is higher than certain level, it would be seen that the closing process is dangerous and the process would automatically stop the closing process and go backward to the open status. Some funny guy use a banana to test if the anti pinch function work well, but certainly we don't use that way in an official testing.
One more sensor was found in the car, which is an weight sensor, to detect the weight of passenger in order to modify the car seat position for two reasons:First, safety reason, concerns the size of passenger to determine the suitable timing of airbag explosion. If the passenger is in a big size, the timing of explosion would be faster, not to let the heat to burn passenger's face. Second, comfort reason, in some luxury car is designed to fit different size of passengers to give them a better support cushion of the seat.
Going to outside of the car, you might easily find the distance sensors on the rear bumper, which is part of the parking assistance system. Those distance sensors would measure the distance from your vehicle to the obstacle behind, and send a signal to the buzzer in your car to remind you that you're too close something in behind.
Another sensor could be found outside the car is the rain drop sensor. In some cars, they have the rain drop sensor, which means if it start raining, the sensor would command the wiper to clean up your wind shield.The last one I wanna talk about is the anti dazzling light sensor. We know sometimes there is some dazzling light in your back mirror from the car behind you, and make you dazzled and cannot clearly observe the situation of your behind. With the help from anti dazzling sensor, it would detect the dazzling light and change the angle of back mirror to eliminate the driver's
blind spot for safety concern.
Sensors I found:
1. anti-pin window sensor
2. AC thermo sensor
3. distance sensor
4. raindrop sensor
5. anti spotlight sensor
6. weight sensor
See some other sensors in your car: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.sae.org/automag/techbriefs_04-00/images/02b.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.sae.org/automag/techbriefs_04-00/02.htm&h=236&w=250&sz=20&hl=en&sig2=vdKqq7JAEiQRLVFAqwwHHQ&start=91&tbnid=SrSaTZ_B58Kr-M:&tbnh=105&tbnw=111&ei=w-TARbGGN4WMggTpjZyUCA&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpassenger%2Bweight%2Bsensor%26start%3D80%26ndsp%3D20%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN
