Good vibrations to settle hire car disputes

Product design and development company Cambridge Consultants says drivers will be able to simply drop off their car if no damage is detected by its DropTag Drive system.

“From a day-to-day point of view, the hire car companies want to know if you have had low-speed bumps, scrapes and so on,” said product manager Tom Lawrie-Fussey (pictured below).

DropTag Drive mainly relies on signals derived from a 3-axis accelerometer of the type found in smartphones, capable of detecting accelerations of up to 12G.

The 25g tag is attached to the windscreen, which then acts as a sounding board. “Vibrations are picked up and amplified by the glass and transferred very readily to the DropTag, giving us a very rich source of information,” Lawrie-Fussey said.

“The fact that the tag is so small and light means that there is effectively no damping of the vibrations, and no extraneous or misleading movements.”

Layered signal processing algorithms filter the rich, broad-spectrum vibration and acceleration information to determine what is happening to the car. The system can detect low-speed car park collisions, down to 2mph impacts.