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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
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".
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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.
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).
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
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.
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!