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Cringely, Cars, and Networks
Boiled Frog writes: "Cringely's latest article talks about Telematics, the art of putting computers in cars. However, the more interesting part is near the end where he talks about mesh networks where every car would have a router in it. I could see this extending digital cell service and mobile network connectivity far into rural areas."
The technology is great but its open to abuse and I for one would like more emphasis on privacy and security.
I, personally, am all in favor of Transit Area Networks, which would be ad hoc wireless networks set up between cars. They could communicate GPS information, and if the driver wanted to, voice data. In case of a crash, the cars would each have a record of what all of the other cars in the area, etc. did.
There are horrible security problems that would need to be worked out, but I've often wanted to be able to beam an "I'm sorry" onto the HUD of the driver I just cut off, or something like that.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
This would be heaven for all those script kiddies out there willing to expand their destruction to moving objects as well!
Imagine your dashboard flashing "I OWN3d J00!!!" moments before the gas and break pedals switch functions.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Mainly due to the product cycles/planning stages of hard disks and cars. Good, last thing we need is people looking at porn AND talking on a cell phone while driving. You need at least one hand free... I swear.
Well, there are some, but they're usually on blocks in the front yard.
I actually study Telematics, and it's not the art of putting computers in cars. It's simply the application of computing to (long) range communication.
>every car would have a router in it.
For a site that sometimes purpots to be concered with the environment, should we really be so glib to add yet another reason to depend on cars for smooth operation of our social infratructure?
"Old man yells at systemd"
The IETF has already thought of scenarios like the one described (a router in every car). Look at the Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork working group.
IP routing is difficult enough without worrying about someone suddenly turning off to Albuquerque with your IP packets locked in the outbound queue.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Let's see, GM (and the rest) sell me a car and with part of the profits, throw in a "free" transmitter/receiver.
Then, 4 years later, GM throws a switch and my car is now part of a mesh network worth $100 billion.
Now, why would I waste any time filing a class action suit againt GM, claiming damages for using my resources without my permission. 1) They could have sold me the car for $30 less, 2) They use up energy that I have to pay for to run the node and to haul it around whereever I go, 3) They steal the use of my resources to make huge profits.
Yep, this class action suit is going to be fun.
Oh wait, all is disclosed in the EULA, and I'm not allowed to resell me car anymore either. It all makes sense now. The only part I have not figured out yet is where Microsoft is involved here.
An enlightened car company -- or better still EVERY car company -- should put a Mesh node in every car they make whether the owner wants it or not. Just what I need, to be tracked everywhere I go by the company I bought my car from. Even better, maybe M$ could buy into the car industry with its $40 billion, and then it could finally control everything!
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
I guess this gives a new meaning to the term "network traffic."
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
> For a site that sometimes purpots to be
> concered with the environment, should we really
> be so glib to add yet another reason to depend
> on cars for smooth operation of our social
> infratructure?
I'm a little depressed at the thought of a world whose "social infrastructure" is the internet. Besides which, cars aren't always going to be damaging to the environment. Eventually they'll be electric.
Another, perhaps more fun, aspect of this is the idea of a mailserver vehicle, perhaps a post office vehicle. So that when the postman travels to *reall* out of the way places, not only will he bring paper mail, but his server could be holding electronic mail for delivery.
With state gov's like New York already banning cell phones in cars, right or wrong, this stuff will get banned as soon as they can find a statistic that this will distract motorists.
In the December 2001 issue of Dr. Dobbs, Ed Nisley, the writer of the "Embedded Space" column, examined the safety of in-car electronics. In specific, he examined the amount of time it takes the avg. person to read a display or press a button, vs. how much distance a car would travel at about 40 mph, 60, or 70 mph. The results are not good. A poorly designed piece of in-car electronics would probably kill much more people than driving with cellphones. A well-designed piece of in-car electronics would probably fare just a little bit better.
Also remember a formula from physics:
KE = (1/2)(m)(v^2)
and the conservation of linear momentum.
Play around with the numbers. Like Nisley says "You may be terrified at the results".
---
Cringely builds his argument for a widespread, car-based wireless network on the premise that the storage required by cars frequently disconnected from a network is an insurmountable problem, given the inability of Hard Disks Drives to survive in the hostile environment of a car. He believes that this problem will not be resolved by HDDs designed to better cope with that environment because the HDD companies can only afford to invest in research that will pay off within a year whereas the car companies plan four years ahead.
IMHO, it's a bit short-sighted to focus exclusively on HDDs; Flash memory makers are currently making great strides in producing chips that, in capacity, compete with miniture HDDs. Their primary financial motivation for this is the perceived huge market for personal MP3 players. I read one article a few months back that predicted a real head-to-head battle between Flash memory and IBM's tiny HDDs.
If we're going to be seeing Flash memory with several GBs capacity, I don't see why they shouldn't be used within cars.
Also, I don't see why the 4 year planning cycle for a new car should be such a problem; that time covers the design process for the car as a whole, no telematics system would be so intrusive as to require being part of that process from Day One. Indeed, it should be something that can be integrated within existing designs.
I'm wary of questioning Cringely's ideas because he does seem to have good sources on this but the direction he's taken that info doesn't seem to have been thought through properly.
Also, it's hard to accept his technical credibility when the software he uses for his site's forum is so damn tacky.
Okay, I'll begin with saying that I should really be raking the excess grass from the yard.
Who the hell wants a browser in their car? What would 'telematics' possibly add to driving? Oh, yeah, that's right, nothing. Getting the shopping list, checking the ball game, etc. can be accomplished via cell phone, terrestrial or satellite radio. Maps can be used with CD or DVD tech.
There's the interface problem. Psychotic interfaces like that on the current 7 series BMW are being blasted in the press.
What are the problems? One more thing to go wrong. And, more insidious:
Take GPS, drive by wire (for those who don't know, connecting driver controls to various computers that actually actuate the throttle, brakes, etc.) and more powerful computers... That's right. I'm going to say it: You speed, your car will pull you over and lock the doors until the local police can get around to giving you a ticket.
Bleh. No thanks. I've got an Olds Diesel wagon in reserve. Computer free, and ready for an EMP.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
... I couldn't respond to your E-Mail because my router crashed... literally...
HAHAHA *ducks*
PDA and handheld device manufacturers are all trying to sell themselves saying "Just imagine accessing the internet wherever you want!". Yeah, it's a good vision. I do believe PDAs have an important role to play in a wireless networked world. Get the network up first. And that ain't no easy task. Mobile phone connections have only become reliable (by my standards) in the past year or two. A true wireless network would be much more demanding in terms of bandwidth, and demand higher levels of performance too. I can accept my phone call dropping out when I drive into a tunnel or a between some big buildings but I'd probably be less tolerant of some IP-based function dropping out. (I don't know why, I just am!).
A network of sufficient capacity and robustness for this level of service, over a wide area, is not coming for a loong time.
It's bad enough we got no-brainers yaking on cell phones who can't talk and drive at the same time. They're usually driving like 20 below the limit.(if you talk and go 70MPH, fine by me). Now with the network systems not only will people be driving slow messing with all the buttons, but will now be swerving around the highway looking at pr0n.
$cat
I figure all cars are going to become part of a tracking network anyway, most likely GPS-based, but making concerns about the effect on privacy of car-based wireless networks redundant. In the same way that car rental companies are starting to use technology to protect their interests (CNet article: Rental-car firm exceeding the privacy limit?), I expect that insurance companies will, at some point in the near future, insist upon something similar.
They won't exactly make it madatory but their fees for unmonitored coverage will be too prohibitive for the average Joe to consider.
I work with Telematics as a software systems architect.
The main problems we encounter are:
Coverage.
Only AMPS can provide any kind of decent coverage in the states. This means 1200 BPS and heavy error correction. We use everything from DTMF tones to stripped down V.27 (fax) data bursts to get the message across. No. Sattelites are too expensive.
Driver attention.
If you are driving a vehicle, you should not play around with an interface. There are also regulations on what you can put on the dashboard when it comes to screens etc. Services has to be kept extremely simple. We are just learning to do voice recognition in an automtive environment with noise, radio, screaming kids etc.
Tech cycles.
A car is supported for approx. 10 years by its manufacturer. Which mobile standard should we use, given that GSM, GPRS, or CDMA gets the right coverage? Forget 802.11 where the vehicles act as nodes in a network. 802.11 only works up to 20 km/h
Conservatism.
The automotive industry have change cycles measured in years, if not decades. It's very hard to match up the mentality of that industry with the dynamic and unstable nature of the computer and wireless business.
Today everyone are aiming at deploying boring, basic services such as theft notification with vehicle tracking, roadside assistance, remote door unlock, crash notification etc. BMW in Europe is probably the leader where the roadside assistance call center can update a map with routes that is displayed in the new 700 series. All European solutions, BTW, uses GSM and SMS messages to transmit data. Its store and forward makes it ideal for low bandwidth mobile communication.
Next generation of services will include traffic, food, gas, service info and geo-ads. Cool things like streaming video is faaar down the road.
When we are playing around in the lab, we look at the possibility of using USB keys as storage (MP3 etc) and ignition keys.
We are also looking into the possibilities of using max-bandwidth/least-cost routing that switches between different technologies depending on what coverage you currently have. You would then have a fixed IP-address that acts as a proxy and forwards packets to the vehicle using CDPD, SMS, AMPS or whatever other links you have to the vehicle this 30-second cycle.
Things are happening, but they are not as fast moving as the rest of the Internet/telco business.
Everyone is apparently far too stupid to realize what its greatest use would be. They're too busy drooling over trying to "get a slice of the $ XX billion a year mobile phone revenue".
We've already got cell phones, and in all the places I travel for work, only once in the backwoods of Kentucky did I ever consistently lose the signal. There isn't enough "flaw" left that quality improvement in this direction is going to make much money. Not enough to justify this effort.
And as for internet access, I sure as hell don't need to share the road with some pervert whacking off to www.farmsex.com. And I don't buy the passenger angle either, the last thing parents need is for 2 brats in the back to be squabbling over which web page to visit. This just isn't very compelling.
What I want, and what I think would ultimately be useful for everyone, is a wireless net link that maxes out at about 300 yards. My car would broadcast its location (via GPS) along with everyone elses, and right up next on the dash board, I'd have a little mini-LCD with a map of the current occupants of the road. What's more, we could also send turn signals and such via this link (in addition to visually). Those places you always come to, where visual signals are ambiguous? Well, you'd now have more than just a left/right turn signal. Signaling for straight ahead, the 2nd from the left of a 4-fork road (yes, I've really seen one of thse, 5 roads meeting at a single point), etc.
Then, there is the traffic jam possibility. What if those people up ahead in a jam could warn you in time to get off at the next exit? Hell, we could even have a "thank you" and "I'm sorry" signals... might cut down on some road rage.
And when critical mass is achieved, we could start to do things that would make this even more useful. Traffic lights, for instance, would detect all the cars relevant to it. So if you're sitting at the stop light at 3am, and no one is going the other way, the traffic light would be smart enough to see this, and change the light to green for you, no waiting. Cyclic lights could die very easily... this would be very close to the smart roads they've been wanting forever.
And you know how those navigator appliances that the new rentals have, that always have the road information as it was 2 years ago? This could augment that. If a road worker plops down a orange warning cone, it starts broadcasting its location and that the road is reduced by one lane.
We could even consider getting rid of some of the traffic sign clutter... it could just be beamed directly to the dash. Instead of signs, a small transmitter mounted on the same pole, with a battery and solar cell panel. How much prettier would our roads look? Hell, you'd always know what the speed limit is (you decide if that's good or bad) because it would show on your dash. For me, I just got a ticket 2 months ago, because a road I thought was 55 for years turns out to be 45mph on one stretch. Could be useful.
And depending on how intrusive we want to let the advertizers become, we could even force them to transmit signage that way too. (Before someone gets bent, remind yourself you can turn off the mickeyD's sign on the dashboard, but we can't currently do the same with a billboard). We could concievably get rid of all signage along roads, and do so without (supposedly) crippling advertizers. Might be a bit prettier along the highways.
And why will this never happen?
#1 Idiots in Detroit like nice shiny technology, but that's as far as their understanding of it or its uses, goes.
#2 Politicians and goverment are the most worthless institution to ever exist in the 14 billion years or so of history of the universe.
#3 Some asshole would insist on making my idea more privacy intrusive than I would, and privacy advocates would go into an uproar (possibly justified).
Ever see the joke: If computer/software companies made cars? Well, just think of the problems when CarAPI v1.0 by M$ is found to have a nasty little hole in it that, when exploited, you car suddenly becomes a moving fireball (i.e the gas tank suddenly explodes while you are driving down I-5 at 80mph). Wouldn't that just be fun?
For a while, I have been telling people that in ten years, we should expect something like 802.11/WiFi beacons on the U.S. interstate system. Cringely's idea is similar, but depends on having cars in your proximity to get a signal.
:^)
Something like this would be a boon for online package tracking -- UPS or FedEx could tag boxes with small GPS transponders (Casio can do it in a watch, why can't it be done on a box?). Having a transponder on the box would allow for real-time package plotting against a roadmap. That way, super-important packages get lost much less, as long as they are within range of a freely-accessible wireless network. At the very least, if it drops off the roadmap at a particular location, you would know where to start looking.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
At a recent computer expo (Comdex), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that get 100 miles to the gallon." Recently,General Motors addresses this comment by releasing this statement, "yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?" Below is a synopsis of the Microsoft Car: Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on. Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail, and you would have to re-install the engine. for some strange reason, you would accept this too. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT". But then you would have to buy more seats. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times faster, twice as easy to drive, but would only run on 5% of the roads. The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades for their cars, which would make their cars run much slower. The oil, gas and alternator lights would be replaced with single "general car fault" lights. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.
While it would take 1,000 hops just to get to yahoo. I dont think so. I bet satellite would be better than this.
This idea has been a dream of mine for the past 19 years. When I was 9 years old, I wanted a pirate radio network that also was combined with "wireless telephone access" nation-wide. Why did I want these two things?
;)
I ran a fairly "largish" BBS in Chicago that had 8 lines, but only locally, and I figured if I could bounce the modem signals over some sort of packet radio network, I could reach users everywhere.
Of course, being 9 years old, I had no knowledge of the Internet (although I still believe I came up with the idea of TCP/IP around that time without former knowledge).
In the past 5 years, a friend of mine and I have been working on some ideas for a similiar network, progressing now to 802.11b, and it seems to work well, even with up to 5 car-nodes in a small area. I had no idea that Mesh existed, and since it does, we'll probably abandon hope on our project (a hobby, not a profit maker).
This guy is right. The car makers can nuke the phone, Internet, and even radio industry in one fell swoop. Then the FCC will regulate these devices, and everything will collapse, but I don't see why one can't operate something like this "illegally."
Even if you can drop a good 500 or so Mesh-type routers within a metropolitan area, I can see it succeeding, and succeeding well. Co-op the costs of transmissions, and I really believe you will be able to make a profit. For those people who don't want to receive "commercial radio," let them purchase their own "sending modules" and transmit their own information.
You can prioritize bandwidth based on how many people are listening to what "stations" and give those "stations" priority on data throughput.
The idea is scary, methinks, but the idea that the Internet will stay cabled has to come to a close. I hate broadband (I pay $130 a month for IDSL, and I could get 1mbit wireless for $40 a month except for a shitty condo association regulation banning radio antennae). I hate dialup.
I installed an 802.11 router on my IDSL, and within a week, about 10 people jumped on my bandwagon (and guess what, I don't care). I know that the future is to throw bandwidth around EVERYWHERE.
Cars will do it. People walking with WiFi enabled PDAs eventually will do it when battery technology can get you a full 10 hour day without shutting down.
So, the question is, what is preventing it from happening? The idea that hard drive manufacturers won't look far enough ahead is bullshit. I can buy 1 gig of RAM for around $200 wholesale, probably cheaper in bulk. 512MB "storage" for the car is MORE than enough for mobile use, and maps, etc, can be burned on a weekly updateable CD or DVD-ROM that the end user can update as they need to. Screw magnetic storage entirely.
Fuck MTV, I want my Mesh
David Reed's open spectrum site links a paper showing that if you're willing to put up with some latency, having mobile nodes can make your total wireless network capacity scale up linearly with the number of nodes. (pdf ps). It's a simple store-and-forward scheme. Put this in every car, with a big hard disk, and say goodbye to wireless bandwidth congestion.
There are a couple of additional potential neat features available here.
If the car has a router built in, and participates in a network, the need for a hard disk in the car decreases dramatically. The example of map data needing to be "in the car" can be countered by having the map data on servers distributed in the area the map data is applicable to. Gas stations, motels, resturants, and so on all want people to visit them.
Get them to put in a server on site with local maps, and they can include their own ad space for their business (at a small additional cost...)
One very specific advantage over carry along map data is regional updates. Road construction, detours, etc, can be locally administered.
As long as you are part of a network, why not pull down a couple of hours of MP3's from your home server? 128M flash is relatively cheap, and getting cheaper. That's an easy two hours there. Most of the US is within a two hour drive of another probable network access, where you can start bringing down more music.
Why force the kids to watch some movie in the back seat. Set up a flat panel LCD on the back of each front seat, give the kids a couple of game controllers, and have them play car wars, or grand theft auto on the freeway and in the streets around you. As the car you are in is known to the router, it becomes the car that the kids are basing their firepower or driving skills from. Additionally the car and the router could be talking, and the actual performance capabilities of the car _at the moment_ could restrict the driving characteristics of the car being driven by the kids.
If you tell the car ahead of time what your destination is, it can check ahead for road conditions for you, and set up trigger points along the way, on the off chance the car breaks down along the way.
As with other security systems described earlier, this car could send you a sms message on a pager or cell phone, if it has been stollen, and could possibly "break down" next to some police for you. Undoubtably there people will mount web cams to the rear view mirrors which will be able to take pictures of the car thief.
Of course if you are borrowing the Beamer from dad to take your girlfriend to the movies, Dad will probably find out if you instead use it to do a Bonzai run.
-Rusty
You never know...
Here comes the Chopper to Chop of your head.
The postal vechicle is one cool idea. The vehicle with access to global positioners could automatically sort the mail for the delivery worker. Usually the postal worker has to spend some few hours before the drive to sort the mail of the route and usually another half hour later in the day to sort the mail on route. Three hours to presort mail is an impasse.
There is news about cellular telephones that stated the radio device should be at least six inches away from the body. The suggestion was included in news report about cancerous body damage. Individuals that used the cellular telephone for most of the day every day have developed cancerous cells. Six inches means not to hold the device in the hands either.
Very low power cellular telephone could use the mobile vechile as the repeater to power up the signal.
LAN parties could boost their network access. Get more vehicles nearby. Imagine what the bandwidth would be for the Sacramento Kings and Los Anegles Lakers.
If your dick is small enough to stick in a woman's "pee hole" you've got some serious problems, dude.
Besides the obvious concerns of driver attention, do we really need to be able to browse websites in our car? I got a dvd player in my car with a screen in the front, I NEVER use it. I can manage the 5 mins between blockbuster and my house. What then? I doubt it will make your life any better. Last time i checked cars were for transportation
hmmmm....a Microsoft Car...would the big features of each car be called "Power Windows" and also if your brakes lock up, just reboot!
I think that video cameras on each car might be useful. Think of how many crimes occur within view of an automobile? Many, if not most, of certain crimes (store robberies, muggings, etc).
Each person would own the camera and control its use. If there was a crime, the police could ask volunteers to check their car cams to see if they got a video record of the incident. The owner would know if they were in the area of the crime or not, either with a GPS/time correlation computer, or just by remembering.
Or, the thing could be automated. The car owner would give permission to the police ahead of time to check their camera, or on a per-incident basis. The police would query the car cam network to find out which cars were near the crime scene at the right time, and be able to fetch the video remotely.
This would be a good thing, and avoid a big brother network. The owners of the cameras are private individuals. The police would have access to the cams only by permission.
The biggest thing is that there's no reason why cam owners have to give their permission to the police. They could give permission to someone else instead, like a citizen's watch group. That way, the cams would not only be looking at the criminals, they would be looking at the police as well. Just like any crime, police abuse happens in private, and these cams would allow ordinary citizens to monitor police and look for evidence of crime.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Related to some of the things you raise -- would be nice for a given route to be able to see a composite picture of road conditions, but stringing together a sort of film taken from multiple car-cams which would give a complete graphical view of the current traffic and weather situation.
concept: Cars alpha, b, iii, 4, V and six are are traveling in that order, perhaps a mile or so apart. (Chosen from an intelligent algorithm that looks for cars which are spaced from each other but traveling at similar speeds). Every several seconds (10? 30? 60?), a picture from their onboard cameras is taken and melded with the other
cars' pictures. The result is 3D-feeling motion map, provided as a heads-up display on my windshield. With wide lenses (or multiple cams) the result could provide a fair amount of peripheral vision as well, make landmarks familiar minutes before they're actually seen by the real driver.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
This is exactly the idea I've always thought off, some sort of monsterous P2P network based on cars that constantly is changing. If we stop, security and privacy issues aside, what could we gain by implementing such a system?
1. An end to traffic congestion. How? Cyclic traffic lights try their best with weight sensors in the road, etc. to predict where traffic is, yet how much more efficient would it be to have some sort of central network saying "no one in left lane, go" and so on. Traffic jams for the most part would disappear. Really.
2. Accidents. These too would be reduced as the entire system would be more efficient. And when an accident did occur, the data in the computer (cars around it, etc.) would prove invaluable in determining the cause.
I don't want to be redundant, but doesn't anyone else see this as something that could really, really improve the quality of life (driving wise, at least) in the US? Sure I'm aware that's a huge infrastructure upgrade that would cost BILLIONS at least. However I think the gains far outweigh the downsides. Yes there are privacy issues, etc. I think the solution would be to simply limit the scope of the protocol to make intrusive privacy impossible due to the limited nature of what is going over the wire. (Err, through the air.) If all that the system can transmit is location, velocity, etc. then the system would not be able to butt in and gather all kinds of crap on you. Just design a very simple networking protocol (not TCP/IP or something, please, think much simpler....) designed JUST for a 'transit area network' and you are done. I don't see things like wireless ethernet in a car being terribly useful anyhow. Everyone talks about internet on a cell phone -- can a web page really look that great on a 1x1 (if you are lucky) screen? Okay, MS has a cell phone OS that supposedly operates in color -- again, is this really necessary? I don't think so.
I can see a lot of posts here wondering just why a car needs network access - and I can understand that. In say, 30 years, there is very little that's changed in their basic design/use. stop/go/gearchange pedals, the same basic controls - and some obvious well-needed features, that have refined themselves over decades, such as aircon, power assist, belts and the like
Starting simple, with the network side of things, is what's happening. Already these information systems are in cars for one important purpose - maintenance, and feedback on just what's happening within the machine. The difference between the speed of auto and computer development doesn't stop their use together, it just takes it down to the slower of the two.
The computing/auto crossover will keep happening, but always as an extension of what's already there instead of as great leaps, as is always promoted.
Along with a car on a long trip go maps - it would be nice to see mapping systems done and refined as well as possible before also adding in every possible gadget on top.
a grrl & her server
There's an angle Cringely missed on adding intelligence to vehicles. There's work going on at UC Berkeley that involves cars talking to each other and sensing where the road is. The idea is if the driver's reaction time is eliminated from driving decisions, you can pack more cars on over-burdened freeways and speed them up as well.
The way it works is there are magnets embedded in the freeway that tell a car where the road is. The cars have transmitters that communicate with the cars in the immediate vicinity so when a car speeds up or slow down, the other cars know it immediately and can react accordingly. You drive onto a freeway and pull in behind a convoy of PATH-enabled cars. The car takes over from there and drives itself until you tell it you want out of the convoy.
Instead of discouraging tailgating, the technology can use tailgating to improve overall fuel efficiency by having the trailing cars draft the leader - much like race car drivers do now except you're not relying on human reactions to make it viable. Human factors come into play as people who have ridden in a car doing 60 mph that's 4 inches behind the car in front find the experience uncomfortable.
The technology has been tested on a section of I-5 near San Diego and actually works. There are of course, reasons why it isn't going to show up in next year's models. Some are technical such as magnetizing enough freeways and dealing with magnets that go bad but a key obstacle is the need to revise liablitiy laws and draft legislation that specifies maintenance schedules and such. Without tort revision, the first accident that involved PATH-enabled cars would kill the technology. People will ignore the fact that we've had non-PATH pileups in the past and focus on "the computer did it..."
I've been thinking about a mobile distributed network for cars for a while now. I was thinking along the line of a main computer, with a 802.11 and a GPS with an LCD for output. It would be used as a communication tool. How many times have you been driving along a country road and just about had a heart attack when a deer jumped out at you? Now a mile down the road you pass a car going in the opposite direction toward the deer. Now wouldn't it be great if your car was broadcasting a signal that had an exact location and time the deer had been seen? The same thing for speed traps or construction.
I think it could passivly monitor the "network" and jump to unused IPs every once in a while to avoid being tracked.
Possibly have some type of intercom system, like modern CBs, so that you can thank people for letting you into traffic. This one I'm not sure how to impliment without aggrivating road range.
Since it's standard 802.11 you could even play Doom with everyone while in traffic. Or you could tie the computer into the stereo and put all your MP3 archives onto it and share them with everyone on the road. (It would be nice and easy to update the MP3s through the 802.11 while your car was in the driveway.)
Just what I have come up with while driving around.
I've run 802.11, with video and voice, with speeds around 20mph (~35km/h). Perhaps the range goes down, but it still works. Better yet, we've run the old AT I've long wanted a valet key that only allows the use of so many gears at such a speed... Would also allow greater parental control (kids keys limited to 65mph and hours from 7a-9p or something).
Voice recognition in noise: why not have a "command" button (ala the Motorola v60). Can mount it on the steering wheel...
Subject says it all.
Michael C. Hollinger
Cringely makes it sound as the big problem with telematics is the need for a harddrive for storing maps.
As a software engineer with three years experience in building telematics systems I can tell you that problem was solved years ago by storing the maps on DVDs or CD-ROMs. A DVD can fit the maps for the whole of Europe. And navigation is not the end all be all of telematics either. Usualy what people mean by telematics is some kind of wireless data access to and from the car and it's here the main problem lies. For one thing you need a reliable data link and so far cellular telephone networks aren't there yet, not even with GPRS. They may work but not reliably.
Another more thorny issue is the case for security. If you are going to allow a network link to a car you need to be absolutely sure that that link can't be hacked. Think for instance about what would happen if someone could turn the volume of the stereo up to max just when the driver is trying to overtake another car. And that's only the most mild of possible hacks, for some systems/cars it might be possible for a cracker to lock the brakes or apply max throttle!
I'd like something more like the R2 units which plug into X-wing and other Star Wars fighting craft. No domed head and swiveling is really necessary, though -- for instance, a laptop would be fine :)
Imagine slipping a laptop (with a microphone plugged into it's audio-in port) into a cushioned and cooled foam sleeve beneath the passenger seat, then hooking a single USB2, firewire, or ethernet cable to it from the car's "assistant" port. Or 802.11, or bluetooth, so no wire necessary. Heck, give that (whatever-it-is) connection the additional chore of carrying a bit of audio, and forget hooking a microphone line separately -- the mic is one of the parts I think could legitimately be part of the car's end of the system. Basically, I'd like one broadish-band connection from car to computer, but with the computer per se quite separate or at least separable.
What sort of things should the car tell the computer?
- sensor readings -- lots of 'em, for instance
...
- Engine Temperature, RPMs
- GPS and altitude (another set I think are OK to be in the car)
- Radar signals (naturally)
- Radio stations in order of reception strength
- Internal and external air temps, precip types
- apparent visibility
- Level and pressure of various fluids (including tire air)
- Horn use
- Speed (this is one which should be wipeable
:))
- Gas tank level (mine tends to ride low)
- Battery levels (a ridiculously underreported but important fact right now -- now even an LED bar indicated current charge)
- Recent fuel efficiency readings
- Cabin air quality -- might want an alert when it's below good levels.
- Light check (headlights, dome lights, map light, keyslot light, etc -- all working and in good order?)
- Doors shut / locked status
- Weight distribution in car
- Image / sound output, as applicable
- Standard webcam stream with one or more cameras either streaming or sending time-lapse images,
- Sonar / low-power radar / IR or whatever other imagery makes sense
- Audio output, two mics each in engine and cabin (for stereo location help) plus
- Direct feed from the a) the car's entertainment system as well as b) from a separate channel carrying any audio messages / warnings from the car itself (door-open buzzers etc).
What should the computer be able to effect through commands *to* the car?Most (but not all) of what I'd like a car computer to do is *collect* data: the point is not what specific data is collected, really, so much as that a number of prioritizeable datastreams are available and self-identifying in a standardized, non-proprietary, format which my droid (whether it looks like a laptop or not) can examine and store, to the degree that I've asked it to -- and that my droid can effect changes both general and situational to make driving easier / more pleasurable / safer.
The car should have the senses (sight, sound, etc) but the brain shouldn't be tied to the car itself -- the most intelligent part of the *car* side of things should be the gathering point for all those sensor's data streams, which should be built to deal with yet-unavailable or un-thought-of streams, so they can be passed on for analysis to the droid when they're eventually implemented.
On the droid side of things, there's no reason there should only be one way to look at or deal with the various datastreams. One person might want a basic black box doing nothing but recording the engine readings, distances traveled and cockpit chatter to a CLI-based utility box stored permanently in the trunk; another might want the whole shebang, down to engine timings and dome-light intensity, controllable from a pretty GUI running on a PowerBook.
If the ins and outs are standardized and available, both of those would be completely feasable. If they're built with some room to grow, the same droid could be updated to recognize and control new things. ("Hey, I added a quartet of over-wheel cams to get a 3D sense of surrounding traffic. I want to record them on my droid.")
There are dangers, sure, but worth working around. I don't want someone else to be able to shut down my engine remotely, not even the California State Police. I don't want a thief to be able to tell my car via 802.11 to open the windows, pop the trunk, and use a built-in olfactory sensor to find money, then blow it out the windows with the fan. Naturally. Current thieves are doing just fine with low-tech methods, though.
OK, I close with a sound of hope, which is roughly "beepTWIRRRdeedeezzzhmmmbeepb'beepsigh ..."
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I've always enjoyed reading Cringley. I like the way he breaks down complex issues to make them easy to understand. And I've always just assumed he knew what he was talking about. So when I see an article about the field I work in, telematics, I think "Cool! Finally someone to explain this to people!" But from reading the article, I think he is really out of his element here. Hard drives? What do hard drives have to do with anything? Has the lack of small rugged hard drives held back the PDA market? No, because there are plenty of other good ways to store data. Automotive systems can (and do) use DVD, CD-ROM, Compact Flash... Four year design cycles for cars? I wish. The industry is targetting 18 months, and some manufacturers are there already. The wireless stuff at the end of his article is interesting, but the rest is way off.
or even the local main dealers. Most of them seem have problems changing a bulb, and charge an arm and a leg for it. My neighbor was charged $60 to change the WATER in his BMW! Imagine the charge to change an RJ45 connector because dirt got in! Its this senario that leeds me to drive an old diesel of the kind that does not need electricity to run, let alone computing.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Yesterday I bought 2 apiece of 2 different toys (from the KB store at the Mall in Columbia, Columbia, Maryland):
a) the Be Boppin' Boogie Electronic Groove Tube, a sound-activated plastic tube with 36 LEDs arranged in 3 rows which pulses with received sound (marked down to just under $10 apiece)
b) (I forget model name) scrolling LED sign; has a built-in keyboard for entering messages. Downsides: cannot be controlled remotely, with a serial port say, and can only hold a single, short (60-char) message; upper case only. Comes with a lot of quickly selectable generic messages, too, though, if you want to say "Happy birthday" or (?) "Remember it takes one to know one" among others. Marked down from $80 to $15. This was even less than I'd been told on the phone; I had been prepared to buy just the one scrolling sign for $26.
However, total cost for four toys was about 52 dollars. Now I can have "Ask me about your driving!" sign scrolling at all times, and have a pulsing light show on the sides of the wagon ... at the price, hard to complain. For $150, you can get a big, more controllable LED sign though. Would be fun to have my voice-savvy car-droid react when I say "Droid! Give that jerk a piece of my mind!" but it won't happen with these cheapies.
Both toys use "C" batteries or a (not-included) AC adapter, btw. I have so far opened only one apiece, but the Groove Tube had old, corroded batteries which I had to disassemble the body to remove, but with fresh batteries it works fine.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
C.A.N (car area network)
or
Special Highway Interstate Transmitter Car Area Netowork, or S.H.I.T.C.A.N, for short.
And run a MS imbedded os, that way when you have a tailgater you can just send a default.ida?XXXXXXXX to get him/her off your back.
.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Every year I drive to defcon from San Francisco - every year I have the same 'what if we could network the caravan' conversation - every year we plan to do it next year.
Bob Cringely should ride along with me this year - maybe it'll happen at long last.
>> I could see this extending digital cell service and mobile network connectivity far into rural areas...
This may work fine in an urban area, but apparently timothy has never lived in a rural area.
If he had, he would have realized that after 5pm, they "roll up the streets and everyone goes home, and the network is effectively dead, because nobody is on the road!
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
Now imagine this R2 unit is hooked up to your lan at home. It gets hacked into and someone drops a nice little app on your machine. Now you car is reporting back that all is fine and your engine burns up because you've been "ignoring" the fact that it says that it's too hot. There is a reason that automotive computer systems aren't designed to be usable anywhere else or for that matter easily replaced by an end user. It's to protect the masses from the half wit that decided to reprogrram his car for better performance. Only to have it drive through a red light because the brake fluid is gone.
Some of the GPS-equipped rental cars already do monitor everything, and tried to hand out speeding fines for it.
Think you're safe in your own car? Data like how high the engine's been revved, speeds its gone, etc, are all being collected and recorded by some newer cars. This information is intended by car companies only for diagnostic perposes, but just think what would happen if your insurance company could use that black box against you.
I have to admit I like this idea a lot, I have been venturing into the area of microcontrollers and small scale bus networks just so I can implement something like this in an older car. The problem is I don't think the general public really wants most of these features. Most people are happy starting a car and having it run, they are not worried about performance and diagnostics, just image and their own comfort. So minus the features that are aimed at performance and diagnostics, that doesn't leave too much demand. Like Cringley said, this sort of thing will take place at small install shops at first.
For the hackers who want the performance and diagnostic tools, all vehicles since 1996 have a standardized but not openly spec'ed ODBC-II connector with many of the sensor readings essential for high tech tinkering, so this isn't a long ways off. There is sizeable hobbyist following out there and they have built a $20 adapter that lets you read from this port via your computer's serial port, and they have deciphered much of the data stream. There is even software for PalmOS out there to display and store real-time stats. Do some searches on Google, you'll be pleasantly surprised.
The other features you'd like are simply a matter of getting GPS and some extra sensors. Also start a database of interesting landmarks and their GPS coordinates and make it open for submissions. IBM's Viavoice SDK is available for Linux, to tie the system together to boot. I think most of the features you mentioned should be tackled at this point.
There is a lot to a project like this and I've been thinking about it for years, and it only gets more modular and grand as I think about it. Maybe too modular, I might as well be writing an OS. I look back over the last two years though and realize I've been mentally masturbating over these ideas and haven't done squat. When do you stop planning and perfecting and build? Well, anyway, this month I'm going to start by programming a microcontroller to do some simple analog sensor data acquisition and build from there. Ultimately though, it'd be nice to have a modular, more general open source solution solution that any can use. One where anyone should be able to simply plug in a module based on their car's make, model, and year.
I turned down the Mercedes TeleAid (their name for their telematics service) on my ML-320 because when I'm in the car, I'm only concerned about driving, and all I ask is that my fellow motorists also be concerned about driving. You think car radios/cellphones/kids in the back seat are distracting? Wait until the guy in the next lane starts weaving towards you because he's trying to drive, shave, and surf foxnews.com at the same time.
Now if only Mercedes could do something about their product quality, rather than loading up the cars with gizmos like air conditioned driver's seats (I'm not kidding - it's an option on the S-Class).
Chip H.
Hmm, privacy concern: Hey, Agent Bob, where is the suspect? Oh, he escaped in car X. Lemme look it up.... ok, ping node #14341431......he's in Reno. Get the bastard.
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
There are some folks taking the modular approach and developing systems that offer a sub-set of these features. InfoMove http://www.infomove.com/ and Wingcast http://www.wingcast.com/ come to mind.
Apparently you haven't considered the fact that the electricity has to come from *somewhere*.
o mmunists/socialists/republicans/democrats/green party/anarchists/neo-Nazis/Arabs/Jews/Illuminati/M asons/Catholics/Vatican/Protistants/Templers/other s.
That's why I drive an environmentally friendly hydrogen powered 1996 Jeep Cherokee Sport. Gets almost 22 MPG of hydrogen. But I prefer to call liquid sunshine.
The fuel sites are being kept a big secret by the (pick any) military-industrial-complex/government/industry/c
They found an ingenious way to mix hydrogen with carbon so it stays liquid long enough for me to drive to the virgin woodlands and feed the trees with the exhaust! Trees love CO2 as well as the H2O that comes out of the exhaust pipe.
I get my hydrogen at Exxon stations. If I buy enough at one time I get a free carwash too!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
trying not to flame, but why use trains of cars? why not use the far more efficient method oft used throughout europe? you can guess this. Trains. they were killed off by oil companies in the usa decades ago, just like the 100 mile/gallon engines oil companies copyrighted to protect their "interests". The problem isn't bad cars, bad drivers, or bad communication. the problem is whenever a new way comes along, some reactionary corperations destroy it. (RIAA? MPAA? sound familiar?
You can`t really trust members of the general public to route your information tho...
Over such a peer to peer node, it would be trivial to sniff traffic.. or spoof other machines, faking the routing etc... or just make a denial of service attack, and with the general public having the routers this would be so much easier. Even with strong encryption, if you faked the server you may not even realise your connecting to a man in the middle.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Imagine that?
Cringely talks about how you cannot put hard disks in cars and expect them to survive. Bull. I have a standard 3.5", 30GB Maxtor in the trunk of my car, serving MP3. It's been there for a couple of years. In that time, I've driving through several states, over rough roads, train tracks, brick streets, etc. without a single bad sector developing.
Cringely forgets that the shock rating it takes to engender a head crash is pretty large, and that the suspension of the average car will convert the short, sharp shocks that would crash your drive to longer, lower g shocks that wouldn't.
Would I want a standard HD in a Jeep? NO. But in the average car, this isn't as much of a problem.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I think this is the first time I've seen a journalist use the term "beleaguered" regarding any company that isn't Apple....