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Transportation

The not-too-distant future of driving: When cars can talk, crashes may be avoided

By Ashley Halsey III,April 10, 2012

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Acura, for example, made a big advertising buy during the recent NCAA basketball tournament to tout its backup sensors, which apply the brakes automatically to avert danger. It is among several automobile manufacturers that are using infrared distance sensors, radar and cameras to provide warnings about safe distances and when other vehicles are sliding dangerously into your lane.

Those and similar advancements that preceded V2V are expected to significantly reduce accidents, which the Insurance Information Institute said cost more than $1 billion in claims in 2010. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimated that if all passenger vehicles were equipped with forward collision warning, lane departure warning, side-view assist and adaptive headlights, which respond to the direction and speed of the vehicle, about a third of fatal crashes and 20 percent of those that result in injury could be prevented or mitigated.

The current generation of devices also may be integrated into V2V systems as they begin to find their way to the dashboard.

“The connected vehicle, that’s probably going to come on a little slower than some of the other concepts, because V2V only really works once every vehicle is equipped with this technology,” said Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “To be honest with you, I think that where V2V may be most useful isn’t safety — it’s congestion management. I don’t want to dismiss the potential safety benefits. I just think they’re farther off.”

Some devices on the market, and many more apps coming soon, provide drivers with real-time help in routing around traffic trouble spots. But the combination of V2V and V2I provides data more immediately than traffic cameras or the network of location sensors now installed on many trucks and fleet vehicles.

If a great many cars suddenly slow a mile ahead, V2V could recommend that a driver take the next exit. If traction control is triggered on several cars just head, V2V could send a warning to be alert for slippery conditions.

Unless the federal government makes V2V mandatory, as it did with air bags and seat belts, it could take 10 to 20 years before most cars are equipped. But drivers could be encouraged to buy V2V equipment more rapidly if companies that make smartphones and GPS devices see a market edge in incorporating V2V and V2I applications.

“If it costs a whole lot to retrofit, that’s going to be a tough sale,” Lund said. “But if you lived in a place like San Francisco or Washington, D.C., where the commutes can be pretty horrible, then if there’s something you could buy that would give you an advantage in knowing how to avoid congestion in real time, I think there might be a market for that.”

Although no one is willing to put a price tag on a V2V transmitter, there’s general agreement that they would be less expensive than an array of cameras and sensors.

Medford said that NHTSA has anticipated public fear that transmitters could be used to keep track of people but that the nature of the system does not allow that.

“It is just a message that is received and acted on in the vehicle,” Medford said. “Nothing is retained, and nothing is identified in that message.”

Lund theorized that one way to get the system fully functioning more quickly would be to equip all vehicles with a bare minimum of a transmitter that sends a signal indicating it’s position.

“Then, vehicles that had smarter systems could at least know where they were and react to them,” Lund said. “But that’s all to be figured out. It’s kind of like ‘Star Wars.’ ”

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