The Dept of Transportation’s recommendations were announced today. It seems like a good idea that should be developed.
I’m puzzled how the system will work in heavy traffic. It seems like that many signals from cars would be a cacophony that even a computer couldn’t make sense of. They’ll probably have a vehicle ID (VIN) in the signal to sort out which cars are on the road near you. Traffic will be challenging for the system designers.
I wonder how much control the system will have over a car? Say someone wanted to change lanes and pass. But there’s a car coming 400 ft away. Will the car refuse to accelerate and let you pass someone? That could be more dangerous than letting the driver pass and get back into his lane.
I wondered about driver confusion if the system was beeping too often. This is one of those ideas that seems simple but the implementation will be difficult.
I think it could save lives if it’s designed correctly and doesn’t distract the driver.
They’ve been working on this for awhile. I want to read the V2V test report from the Univ Michigan study. It should give a better indication what they are designing.
Won’t be installed in my car, that’s for sure, I’m allergic to “nannyware”, besides, it probably won’t function too well with a MANUAL transmission anyway
Nope, I’ll concentrate on DRIVING myself, thank you
A few hundred feet is more than enough. The trackers to monitor these along roadways would be cheaper than videocams, which already abound in the thousands in some cities.
Also, anyone could track someone quite easily with this. Stalkers will love this. Nevermind what the police (or anyone with access to the police database, legally or illegally) could do.
“Nanny state” is too nice a term. This is flat out Orwellian.
License plate recognition is already a mature technology, and it’s only going to get cheaper and easier to implement. Your vehicle is already emitting self-identifying electromagnetic radiation everywhere it goes in the form of reflected light. It’s only a matter of years before there’s a functioning Arduino-based license plate recognition module on the market that will probably cost a couple hundred bucks. In 10 years, these things will be cheap enough to drop all over a city and track everywhere you go. Your only defense will be removing your license plate Steve Jobs style.
Going forward, preventing government abuse of collected data is going to have to be a matter of policy and oversight instead of technology management. There’s just no way around it.
I’m wondering what would happen in this hypothetical scenario: I try to swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid hitting a pedestrian who steps out (without looking) in front of my car. Let’s say the pedestrian doesn’t have a cell phone. The car senses oncoming traffic and keeps me on the straight and narrow. The pedestrian gets hit and they die. It’d be the pedestrian’s fault in the eyes of insurance, but it would be the system’s fault that my car killed someone instead of causing a nonfatal collision.
I think motion detection, like Google is doing, is much preferable to this kind of remote monitoring.
So, you get distracted, don’t notice that the car in front of you has stopped suddenly, and you plow into him - but it is okay since no computer made a decision for you. The people stuck in the traffic jam you caused thank you.
Cellphones took care of that already. Maybe this technology will keep some moron who is texting from killing someone. Or himself.
I’ve gone past enough crashes where one car plowed into another to be all for this technology. It will be a lot cheaper than the radar in the Google cars.
