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Cars could one day spill the beans on hit-and-run drivers, says the German
component maker Bosch. It suggests building a pair of pressure-sensitive strips
into new cars to reveal whether a vehicle has collided with a pedestrian (WO
01/98117). One strip is built into the front bumper, while a second strip is
mounted higher up, on the front edge of the bonnet. Minor parking accidents are
registered by one sensor only. But collision with a pedestrian leaves the
telltale record of a hit from the front bumper sensor, followed a split second
later by a hit from the bonnet sensor. The data is time-stamped and stored in a
tamper-proof data logger for future comparison.