Ford Building Cars That Talk To Other Cars

thecarchik writes "Ford's new system works over a dedicated short-range WiFi system on a secure channel allocated by the FCC. The company says the system one-ups radar safety systems by allowing full 360-degree coverage even when there's no direct line of sight. Scenarios where this could benefit safety or traffic? Predicting collision courses with unseen vehicles, seeing sudden stops before they're visible, and spotting traffic pattern changes on a busy highway. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported in October that vehicle-to-vehicle warning systems could address nearly 80 percent of reported crashes not involving drunk drivers. As such, it could potentially save tens of thousands of lives per year."

These systems which preach safety and security..

[intellitech]

In the sense of network architecture, the only way I would be even semi-okay with this would be if it really was completely decentralized and peer-to-peer. These types of systems which preach safety and security worry me, as they also could lead to large-scale privacy concerns decades down the road, since you know the various Traffic Management Authorities would jump head over heals for the ability to see real-time position of all cars on the expressway. Then a few years down the road, somebody commit's a crime in or with a car with one of these systems, a politician jumps on the new piece thinking it would make a great "brand item" for his campaign, and given a little bit of misguided legislation, BOOM. The main problem with centralizing management and data.

Though, I _am_ taking this a little far, I hope some of the things from Minority Report [wikipedia.org] never come to be.

By the way, off-topic, but is the "There was an unknown error in the submission" just there for old-times sake, or did that whole thing get ignored again?

The problem with these predictions...

[catbutt]

...about how many lives will be saved, is that they don't take into account that once in place, people rely on them, and change their behavior accordingly. So if I feel like my car is going to alert me if I am likely to hit something, I don't feel so obliged to pay close attention to my driving -- effectively canceling out much of their effect.

Re:The problem with these predictions...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the same as airbags, seat belts, ABS and every other safety innovation for automobiles. It only works for cars that have them installed. If new vehicles implement them, it will just be a matter of time before the vast majority of the automotive fleet has them. After all, how many cars on the road don't have 3 point safety belts now? How many don't have airbags? In 10 years how many cars won't have those?

The inertia of an existing system is no reason to not try to improve it. Every change has to start somewhere.

Re:These systems which preach safety and security.

[rockNme2349]

More importantly to me, is whether or not these are implemented using open standards.

Car-to-Car communication isn't helpful when 10% of them use FORD wireless communications, 10% have GM brand Safety wireless etc. etc.

Re:Forget about talking to cars -Talk2 traffic lig

[rwyoder]

There's few things more irritating to me than waiting for a red light when there are no other vehicles at an intersection. All I want is a simple way to communicate to the traffic light to let it know that I am approaching so I don't have to stop. It seems that most automatic lights I have encountered wait until I have come to a near full stop - which partially defeats the purpose.

Implement this and then BAM - instant time savings and 3+ Miles per gallon savings for every vehicle on the road.

The solution already been invented, and doesn't even require high-tech: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout [wikipedia.org]

Re:Big traffic cop is watching

[Rockoon]

Whenever the car starts, generate a random ID that's statistically certain to be unique.

This is slashdot. You are supposed to be familiar with why this line of thinking is wrong. Did you not learn about hash tables and their nonintuitive collision rates? The fact that you have "randomized" it doesnt change the problem.

The problem isn't that at any given moment a vehicle in operation is around only a few other vehicles. Sure, the collision rate will be small for any particular car, but there are millions of cars on the road right at this moment.. tens or even hundreds of millions of ID vs ID collision chances are happening right now as a type...

Hour after hour.. day after day.. you are rolling those hundreds of millions of chances looking for hash collisions...again and again and again...

These random ID wouldn't be 'statistically certain to be unique' ... quite the contrary, they are statistically certain to eventually match