- A new patent from Jeep aims to help off-roaders who water-ford across rocky rivers
- The proposed tech essentially uses radar to sense hidden underwater obstacles
- What makes it more new-school is working sensors and cameras into the system
The days of using the phrase “I didn’t see it!” as an excuse after hammering your truck’s suspension pieces to smithereens while traversing an off-road water obstacle may be coming to an end. A new patent filed by Jeep floats (pun intended) the idea of using a network of sensors to warn of impending doom hidden beneath the water.
Engineers for the company say that, in at least some conditions, this underwater detection system could provide information to a driver about obstacles in the briny deep, including their location and size. This would be incredibly handy when driving through water in an off-road environment, particularly one unfamiliar to the driver. After all, locals might know about that Big Rock lurking under the surface and waiting to mangle a wheel hub, but noobs to the area are not likely to have such information.
The system would be comprised of numerous cameras and sensors, including ones for submersion, plus a so-called controller. It is presumed the latter could, in theory, be used to automatically avoid an obstacle — not unlike on-road tools such as lane-keeping or automatic crash avoidance. After all, a myriad of dirt-road features already permit these rigs to crawl along a trail without accelerator or brake inputs from the driver; adding a touch of steering control to the equation wouldn’t be a stretch, given the correct lines of computer code.
Also worth mentioning is the note that this system could be tied into a GPS system, suggesting drivers could record their underwater data so they’re better prepared the next time they venture into the same watery path. We will also speculate that such information could be uploaded to the cloud and shared with other drivers with this system — again, not too much of a stretch, since Jeep is already in bed with onX and its (partially) crowd-sourced off-road mapping program, which counts over half a million miles of trails across almost a billion acres of land in America.
We’ll take this opportunity to remind all hands that patents don’t always become reality, especially in the automotive sphere. For example, Jeep also has an idea on the books to permit the Wrangler’s traction and stability control systems to perform a “front dig” which has yet to see the light of day. However, other patents in this vein of electronics helping off-roaders such as Trail Turn on the Ford Broncohave made it to market, meaning this system isn’t a total flight of fancy.
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