Is this the future of towing?

An all-female design team has come up with a radical new way to hitch a caravan to a tow vehicle.

The Automatic Trailer Connection concept does away with the humble towbar, which has been used for decades, and instead uses an automatic docking station that doesn’t even require the driver to get out of the car.

Semcon, a Swedish technology company specializing in product development, decided to put together the all-women team to provide fresh perspectives on male dominated businesses.

Semcon said the idea was to make towing and connecting a trailer easier for all people, especially women who are put off by the various steps involved in hitching a trailer.

The Swedish company conducted a survey that showed that 50 per cent of people prefer not to use a trailer at all, with 70 per cent of these women.

“If we had been a team with a lot of men, perhaps this project would have been discarded, for not being a problem, it works fine the way it is,” one of the designers on the project, Sara Nilsson said.

“With this concept we decided to get rid of the old-fashioned towbar, instead the trailer connects to the car with an automatic docking connection,” she said.

“The idea is to take advantage of the smartness that already exists in cars today. When the car is close enough it identifies the trailer using onboard sensors, to get in the right position for docking the car and the trailer communicates with each other through the Cloud.”

Once the trailer ‘pin’ has docked, a mechanical lock secures the trailer and an in-car monitor tells the driver when it is safe to drive off.

Semcon has produced a video of the process, which is yet to be tested or put into production.