An astonishingly common problem that often goes unreported is the situation where a driver loses control of their vehicle after suffering a serious health-related problem when driving. To address this problem, BMW is working on a new system that will allow the car to be brought to a safe and controlled stop on the side of the road during a health-related emergency. Labelled the “Emergency Stop Assistant”, it is currently in the prototype stage and works by triggering an autonomous driving mode whenever it notices that the driver has a serious medical problem.

This autonomous driving mode will then execute a controlled emergency stop by bringing the vehicle to a complete stop automatically, while also allowing for any surrounding traffic. Simultaneously, an emergency call is sent out containing information required to start the necessary medical and traffic-related assistance measures. Development is being managed together with the German government under the new SmartSenior research project, but there is no market release date as of yet.

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As if it wasn’t difficult enough to be a cop, it looks that our men and women in uniform had quite some troubles driving those mean Chrysler machines. Dodge Chargers and Magnums equipped with the police package and the column shifter will be sent back to Chrysler. The company recalled the cars after finding out that the proper transmission gearshift position on the dash isn’t displayed properly.

And it’s not because cops can read right, but it’s because Chrysler messed this up. About 20,000 models are being recalled from the 2006 straight to 2009 models. The whole thing will be fixed in no time. Hear that villains? You won’t find those Chargers and Magnums tailing you for a while.

via Good Car Bad Car

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