The Soft Car Project was conducted with Millennium Project Fund of the Japanese Government for the period from August 2000 to March 2003. Soft Car is "a car whose maximum speed and related characteristics are chosen according to the traffic environment and the choice is indicated to outside". To inform existing cars about Soft Car, there is installed a speed indicator, with which the driver declares 4 levels of maximum speed (15, 30, 60 and 100km/h) to outside (speed indicator starts flickering when the speed exceeds the declared maximum) and multi-level maximum speed limiter with which maximum speed is mechanically set, and a remote control system which controls both speed indicator and speed limiter. A Soft Car experiment was conducted in a small district of Ichikawa-city of Chiba, next to Tokyo, installing speed indicators on 27 cars, on about 20 bikes and 30 bicycles in daily use from December 2001 to January 2002. The monitors and participants to the experiment showed quite positive response on questionnaires on usefulness of the equipments, effectiveness of the experiments, etc. Another Soft Car experiment was conducted in Malacca, Malaysia, and it was well accepted by foreign participants as well as local residents and media and state government. The significance of Soft Car lies in its potential capability of decreasing traffic accidents, developing harmonious urban spaces at immensely low cost, constructing firm base of intelligent transport system, and developing new market for safer cars and new social infrastructure. For the covering abstract see ITRD E123876.
Abstract