FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Soon Cars Will Talk to Each Other

We've come a long way from the Model T.

Imagine, you're cruising down the highway doing seventy when your car tells you to watch out, because the Honda around the upcoming corner has told your car that it's driver just slammed on the brakes.

That scenario could likely be reality within the next five years, according to researchers testing vehicle-to-vehicle communication technology, along with the auto industry and US Department of Transportation. University of Michigan researchers have been testing the technology for 10 months with a fleet of 3,000 cars, and will demo it for the DOT this week, MIT's Technology Review reported today.

Advertisement

As of now, "talk" really means "communicate," and for the most part they're transmitting data, not language. Right now. The cars can tell each other their location, direction, speed, and when and which way they’re about to turn. They can also communicate with traffic lights, street signs, and tollbooths—"vehicle to infrastructure" information.

It works likes this: The cars have a GPS antenna mounted on the trunk and a transmitter/receiver device installed under the seat, which can send a short-range wireless signal about 300 yards. The device also has a speaker on it so the car can give audio warnings to the driver.

Apparently, the volunteers in the study are loving their futuristic rides. "Some people don’t want us to take it off their vehicle ever,” research lead John Maddox told the Technology Review. The auto industry is likewise gung ho; Toyota, GM, Ford and other major companies supplied the cars for the study. No doubt they're wondering what they could charge for this latest innovation.

“People talk about intelligent vehicles, or cars talking to each other, like it’s something out of The Jetsons, but it shouldn’t sound like science fiction," Mike Shulman, a research and innovation lead for Ford, told Forbes.

We've certainly come a long way from the Model T. Cars are already highly computerized—we've got GPS, auto-parking, cruise control, and digital touch screens. But interconnected cars offer a sneak peak into something bigger: what the "internet of everything" might look like.

The Institute for the Future recently wrote about "the age of networked matter," a futuristic vision of society where computer networks and the real world essentially merge into one. The institute describes "a tapestry of networked matter: systems of networks that communicate seamlessly…where everyday objects will blog, robots will have social networks, microbes will talk to kitchens, and forests will 'friend' cities."

That sounds like science fiction, but the Internet of Everything concept is becoming realized. Soon cars will be totally autonomous, an innovation that dovetails nicely with talking vehicles. Self-driving cars use sensors, lasers, and cameras to collect information like the where the edge of the road is, or a lane, what street signs say and if pedestrians are near by. Peer-to-peer communication would make that even more efficient. Will the future of transportation be an intricate web of interconnected robot cars that know where each other are going, can avoid traffic, and anticipate crashes?

The "car-to-x" communication system, developed in Germany as part of the European nonprofit Car2Car consortium, is nearly ready to hit the marketplace. BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, Audi and Mercedes are all on board; Mercedes even wants to see its customers driving talking cars by the end of this year.

Back stateside, the government will decide in the coming months whether to back the technology and mandate that all cars include vehicle-to-vehicle networks for safety reasons. Regardless of what the DOT decides, talking cars are coming, along with automatic highways and driverless vehicles and a whole new way of thinking about transportation.