Gadgetory

this is Chris with the verge and we're here at CES 2014 looking at Ford's vehicle the vehicle communication demo this is all about safety we're in a little road course that set up in a parking lot across the street from the convention center here at CES there are two Tauruses and they're wired up with this system that's constantly broadcasting information about where the car is what direction it's facing the yaw the speed and the concept is that by transmitting that information to other cars this car can stay safer by knowing where that car is so the first scenario for demonstrated for us was the idea of you overtaking car in expressway for instance a lot of cars now have what are called list sensors which are these little amber lights that are in the side view mirrors that indicate when there's somebody in your blind spot but the problems that they don't work at speed necessarily and they don't work when a car is way behind you so when you have these cars transmitting data to one another you enable that you don't need a sensor that has to shoot that far behind you you just communicate via what is this effectively a Wi-Fi like standard the cars positions relative to one another and then the car in front knows hey I shouldn't merge over right now because there's a car that's about to overtake me the system can literally see through cars if there's a vehicle in front of you that doesn't have vehicle to vehicle communication enabled but the one in front of it does and that car breaks hard your car will know so that you have more advanced warning that you need to slow down they showed us a second example of this sort of seeing through cars situation where say you're pulling up to a toll booth the vehicle in front of you suddenly swerves out of the way and the vehicle ahead of that is stopped well before you would have been able to see that but with this system you can because your car knew all along exactly where the car and at the very front was so if you're traveling at speed you can get a warning that you need to slow down you're not going to be surprised when the car in front of you stores out of the way and finally if so what could happen when a car goes through a red light well actually we didn't see that and that's a good thing and that's because we had the system in place so say you're coming up to an intersection you have a green light you go well if a car is coming at speeding in the other direction it has a red light doesn't see the red light you're dealing with a drunk driver who knows and they have that vehicle vehicle communication system enabled they're going to be able to communicate to your vehicle that they're moving quickly your car is going to know to tell you to stop even though you have the green light unfortunately this technology isn't super close to going into production there a few different challenges one is of the standard still isn't set in stone secondly they're dealing with a few problems take for instance when you have ten thousand cars on LA traffic and they've been stuck there for days on end in close proximity the bandwidth just isn't there to support that many cars while shooting these signals at the same time so they're figuring out what to do about that but if they can overcome that stuff Ford is saying that we might see this on the road say about 2020 which by the way happens to be about the same timeframe for fully automated cars and you can obviously see how this plus self-driving could work hand in hand