Cars talking to each other?

Driving a car has always been looked on as one of the pleasures of life, although if you do it regularly, and specially if you do it in very busy city streets, it can quickly become a pain. What used to be a relaxing and almost meditational exercise can quickly warp into a minefield of heavy traffic, avoiding collisions, watching out for errant pedestrians, and basically playing speed chess with highly mobile pieces that weigh around a ton each. When you stop and think about it like that it’s enough to make you leave the car in the garage and phone in sick!

But hold on, looks like technology is finally coming to our rescue with regard to safely navigating busy streets, and taking the stress out of the daily commute. Car-to-car communication is the new thing, and it could be in a new car you might be thinking of buying in a year or two.

Car-to-car communication

The technology is designed to transmit and receive data about the vehicle, so that, assuming most of the vehicles on the road were fitted with it, each one would know where all the others were. Not only that, each one that came within the working radius (probably a few hundred meters) would be providing details of its speed, direction, brake status, even the position of the steering wheel. So each car would be ‘aware’ of all the others … and how fast they were going, in which direction, whether they were accelerating or decelerating, and probably half a dozen other parameters as well.

This should make it a good deal safer to drive. It’s not going to take over the driving (they’re working on cars that can do that!), it just makes it much less likely that another car will career into you through driver error or the wheels simply losing traction, causing a skid. In that kind of eventuality, your car would warn you of the danger, and probably take over, momentarily, to snatch you out of the jaws of danger.

High fatalities provide a massive incentive

Creating the car-to-car network is presenting quite a challenge to developers; the on-board computers in each car have to process the data from numerous cars many times a second and make decisions based on all that information. There’s a huge incentive to get it right though; at the moment there are more than five million car crashes a year in the US alone, 30,000 of them resulting in fatalities. Get this technology right, and get it installed in most new cars, and it will have a significant impact on those horrifying statistics.

After extensive testing between 2012 and 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the University of Michigan concluded that the technology could potentially prevent more than half a million accidents and over 1,000 fatalities in the US each year.

World Health Organization statistics indicate that there were over 1.2 million fatalities worldwide in 2010, which equates to one person killed on the roads, somewhere or other, about every 25 seconds. Truly horrifying! If this new driving technology can put a huge dent in those figures it will, without doubt, be one of the most significant advances in safety ever achieved.

Incidentally (if you’re eager to get your hands on another frightening statistic), half of all road accident fatalities are estimated to be comprised of pedestrians, motor cyclists, and cyclists. Wow!

But hold on, it’s not quite ready yet!

The fledgling technology is being tested at the General Motors Research Center in Michigan. And GM has committed to using car-to-car communication in a 2017-model Cadillac. Of course, the first few cars with the new technology will be pretty lonely – there’ll be hardly any other cars on the road to share information with so they will, in effect, be talking to themselves for a while. Considering how many fatalities this new technology is likely to prevent, it can’t arrive quickly enough. But don’t get too excited; it’s estimated that it’s likely to be more than a decade before it becomes commonplace.