In 2009, more than 30,000 Americans were killed in car
crashes. Most of those accidents were avoidable — the result of driver error.
Now, the auto industry wants to cut down on traffic deaths by
using vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology.
The technology enables cars in close proximity to one
another to share information wirelessly. The premise behind it is that most
crashes are avoidable if drivers have enough time to react.
This isn't exactly a new idea. A General Motors film from
the 1939 World's Fair imagined a technology similar to what's finally making it
onto roads today.
Avoiding Pileups
In an empty parking lot in Washington, D.C., Ford Motor
Company engineer Joe Stinnett demonstrates how its "" technology
works today.
He follows two other cars closely — too closely. It's the
kind of scenario that often leads to 60-car pileups.
"So, we're just going to drive down to the end
of the track here," Stinnett says. "At the end of the track, the lead
vehicle is going to hit the brakes. So, you can imagine if this was a foggy or
snowy day with limited visibility, this would be even worse."
All three cars are equipped with a small GPS and Wi-Fi unit,
just like inside a smart phone.
Ford is investing heavily in the technology and plans to
launch a fleet of prototypes equipped with it this spring. The cost is pretty
cheap — about $100 per car. And it lets cars communicate things like latitude,
longitude and speed with one another at a range of about 1,500 feet.
"They're monitoring the position of all the
vehicles around you and determining who is an immediate threat to your vehicle
— and what type of threat that vehicle is," Stinnett says.
An alarm sounds in Stinnett's car because he's following the
other vehicles too closely.
"So, basically, what you saw was, you saw the lead
vehicle's brake lights go off, and then you immediately saw the alert go off in
this car — even before you had this vehicle ahead of you, before you saw their
brake lights," he says. "So, you get that advanced alert."
Installing The Technology In All Cars
Ford is working with most of the world's other major
automakers to turn this technology into a basic safety feature of every car.
This vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology will be
most effective if pretty much every car on the road is equipped with it.
James Sayer, a safety expert at the University of Michigan
Transportation Research Institute, says giving drivers a few extra seconds of
warning before a crash could dramatically reduce traffic accidents.
"It still is the case that the weakest link is
the driver," he says. "The vast majority of errors in driving that
lead to crashes are because of the driver. It's rarely the case that the wheel
falls off."
Privacy Concerns
There is one concern about this technology that the auto
industry is very sensitive to: privacy.
After all, cars could soon be telling every other nearby car
— and who knows who else — details about location, speed and where they've been
in the past five minutes.
Ford and other companies are trying to make that data as
anonymous as possible.
"The fact that we walk around the streets with smart
phones all the time means that, essentially, the phone companies can track
where we are if they wanted to, so I think there's lessening concern on the
part of the public about the privacy," Sayers says.
Limited trials of vehicle-to-vehicle communications
technology will start later this year. If they're a success, the government
could mandate that all cars be equipped with these devices before the end of
the decade.
Article Credit: www.npr.org
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