Gadgetory

perhaps you've heard the recent buzz about so-called talking cars it's got a tour of a lab where automakers and government researchers team up to create new technologies that help cars communicate with the world around them and with each other they can tell you if an oncoming vehicle is about to run a red light or if a car is coming around a blind corner or if a detour would help you save some time and gas this gives cars our 360 degree awareness of nearby vehicles common navigation systems are not precise enough we needed a localization that can give us exact position on a centimeter base the system can also alert drivers to approaching emergency vehicles if a crash is detected emergency crews can be dispatched drivers can be diverted immediately to alternate routes each traffic light has to be correctly identified in the oil weather and lighting conditions this car is stopped the car two vehicles behind it can't tell because of traffic in the middle but thanks to vehicle to vehicle communication the driver in the back it's a warning to break even though he couldn't have seen it humanely the technology is called DSRC dedicated short range communications it gives vehicles a new built-in radio if you will that operates in the 5.9 gigahertz band and allows them to communicate to each other in a very specific way to tell each other where they are the direction they're heading and the speed they're going it's largely focused on preventing accidents a bi research for example predicts that about 10% of new cars shipping will have the SRC by 2018 and that goes up to 70% by 2027 some pretty good numbers in the United States as of February 2014 the Department of Transportation announced that it will announce a pending date soon by which all new cars must ship with DSRC radios enabled the goal 70 to 80% reduction in accidents in Europe it's even more ambitious they're looking for a 100 percent accident free zone by 2050 thanks to DSRC but specifically how would these DSRC enabled talking cars get to those lofty goals well let's consider some of the scenarios that have been tested at the University of Michigan's safety pilot program in Ann Arbor Michigan intersections cars at all four directions would signal their position and preceding movement to each other to avoid collisions t-bones and right-of-way screw-ups rear-end collisions the DSRC equipped car in front of you would always tell your DSRC equipped car that it's stopping and how fast it's doing so passing oncoming cars would signal their direction and closing speed to your car so you'd always know when it's mathematically disastrous to try and pass ending the crude white-knuckle guesses that human drivers make all the time pedestrians and bikes DSRC radios could also be pocketable or even integrated into future smart phones to make pedestrians and bikes part of this crash avoidance scenario as well now all the above can be manifested in two major ways active and passive technology active technology means the information from DSRC is sent to the cars computers which control braking acceleration and even steering to automatically avoid a collision passive of course merely gives the driver indications on the dash about what's about to happen that they want to avoid to alert them to do so the nice thing about passive is it could conceivably be retrofitted millions of cars already on the road now beyond the enormous accident reduction goals there's another benefit to DSRC and that is increased efficiency of fuel consumption and roadway usage through several means the first of which is to communicate traffic phase and timing to cars the DSRC information would tell the car how long the current traffic light collar will be in effect and when it will change allowing the car to adjust its trajectory for best traffic flow fuel usage and momentum conservation and linking where our private cars would form on the freeway for example little ad hoc road trains following each other as little as maybe three feet nose to tail which makes vastly better usage of the existing road infrastructure we have and also could gain some nice aerodynamic benefits for the cars in that train now the hurdles first of all we're talking with the car industry here so you know proprietary is part of the game that needs to be overcome because DSRC is one of those things that will benefit most by working out spectrum bandwidth and coding to be global and universal in markets around the world spectrum DSRC in cars is in a bit of a spectrum battle with another technology innovation called uni I wear wireless carriers want to open up a lot more Wi-Fi that they would use for smartphones to move their data traffic to but it's also in that 5.9 gigahertz band automakers don't like the idea of sharing any wireless space with another service like that they're afraid it's gonna lead to breakdowns in cars keeping themselves safe they don't like the liability or the bad PR that could come from that for their part the wireless carriers say look we can learn to work with you and make sure that our wireless traffic always yields to automotive traffic to make that top priority the FCC is gonna have to decide that one infrastructure many of DSR sees benefits like traffic signal phase and timing would require traffic signal and control center upgrades by perineal II broke municipalities there's the fleet issue DSRC is gonna work best when virtually all cars have it but we have a half a billion cars already on the road in the US and the EU alone that don't have it it will take decades or generations to turn them over DSRC is often described as a moonshot and that's not overstating it it would dramatically change the relationship between cars on the road toward the goal of safety as well as efficiency of road and fuel consumption and it would certainly do a much better job than almost all scenarios of the often bored distracted ill-trained or drunk vague where we know as the human driver