Your car has enough airbags and crumple zones to get you through that once-in-a-lifetime high speed crash. Now, Ford has developed a radar system that helps keep you safe from the daily hazard of being clipped from the side as you back out of parking space. Separately, Ford announced a blind spot mirror (photo) that embeds a convex mirror element in the upper left corner of the driver side mirror to make for safer lane changes and parking. The radar-based Cross Traffic Alert with Blind Spot Monitoring System builds on the optional Blind Spot Monitoring System now available. Normally, blind spot monitoring (or blind spot detection) alerts you to not change lanes on the highway. Ford uses the same sensors when you're backing out of a parking spot to look for vehicles as much as 65 feet away on your left or right. If cross traffic is approaching, the driver sees an indicator light in the outside mirror nearer to approaching traffic, and hears a warning tone.

Traditional backup sonar or radar systems only sense obstructions behind or slightly to the side of the car -- too late to alert you to somebody coming up quickly in hopes of beating another car to an open parking space. The Cross Traffic Alert feature will become available on some Ford, Lincoln and Mercury products as an extra-cost option sometime in 2009 and over time be offered throughout the line.

The Blind Spot Mirror "will launch early next year ... as standard equipment," Ford says, and over time migrate through the FoMoCo lineup. While you can buy stick on convex mirrors now, they're small, cheap, and often lose their reflective coatings. In comparison, Ford says, its offering is "robust to the elements." Some European cars offer drive-side mirrors where the outer quarter (aproximately) slopes off to form a convex shape, but they typically aren't offered in the U.S. because of concerns that litigation-minded Americans are too stupid to know a convex mirror edge when they see one.

With these innovations, Ford by next year will have almost a half-dozen ways to cover your back and side:

* Rear view camera
* Backup sonar, called Reverse Sensing System by Ford
* Blind Spot Monitoring (others say blind spot detection)
* Blind Spot Mirror
* Cross Traffic Alert