By Victoria Stone-Meadows
CASEY Highway Patrol will have access to the latest in safe vehicle technology while they use the new police ‘Guardian’ vehicle.
The new high tech car was on display at Cranbourne Park Shopping Centre on Tuesday 4 October, for police to show the public the next generation of policing vehicles.
Acting Inspector Craig Thompson of Casey Highway Patrol said the public showed a lot of interest in the new car and had lots of questions.
“Everyone has been very interested and impressed and wanted to know more about the car,” he said.
“It educates them of the benefits of purchasing and driving a safer vehicle themselves.”
The car, a Mercedes-AMG GLE 63 4MATIC Coupe, has incredibly high tech safety features to keep both the occupants of the car and everyone else on the road safe.
Just a few of the safety features included in the car are things like attention assist, collision prevention assist, pivoting headlights, lane keeping assist and heaps more.
Attention assist gives the car the ability to monitor the driver’s driving behaviour and pick up on signs of fatigue and issue warnings to the driver.
The anti-collision software includes technology such as blind-spot detection with cross traffic assist where the brakes automatically apply pressure to avoid accidents.
Acting Inspector Thompson called the car “one of the safest vehicles that have ever been produced.”
While the vehicle is just a concept car for police use, Casey Highway Patrol will have use of it from 2 to 14 October.
“The car was used in Cranbourne last weekend (Grand Final Weekend) for their scoreboard state road traffic operation, targeting serious injuries, distractions, speed and drink/drug driving,” Acting Insp Thompson said.
While this particular car may not be added to the Highway Patrol fleet, Acting Insp Thompson is confident a similar car will be added in the near future.
