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Ford Testing a New 'Traffic Monitoring' Device
Poletown writes "The Detroit Free Press put out this article today about a new vehicle based 'traffic monitoring' system that Ford is testing. It will report your speed, the road temperature, whether or not your wipers/headlights are active, and even if you've used your anti-lock brakes. Initially, the system will be tested on Ford-owned and municipal vehicles."
it does all that but it doesn't drive yet!??
but seriously, what use is a traffic monitoring system - if you live in an area REALLY hit by traffic (i live near Central London, UK), there is usually almost no way to avoid it! what's the use unless you're a long distance commuter, or want to decide whether to use subway/underground or car
tim
Microsoft will soon take away Ford's glory, Bill vs Henry round two with Traffodata 04.
Nerd history of the Traffodata is located in Fire in the Valley, a great computer history book.
This would be cool if there was some way to hook up your own home PC and access the data. You could write cool python scripts to visualize your commute to work, etc.
When I have kids, I'll expect updates on all their cars' data at regular intervals.
I can't decide whether to praise this kind of "innovation" for the convenience, or to complain about the possibilities for abuse. I know we'll hear plenty of both - but I'll lean toward praising this for now. Technology will always be abused, and complaining about basically harmless things and their potential for evil is not generally productive.
This can potentially further clog the microwave/radio spectrum, depending on the range of these sensors. Also, unless some standard exists/is applied, competing manufacturers could select different protocols, leading to a babel of messages, and more traffic jams rather than less
It could have some good use as an anti-theft device.
No comments on the Orwellian overtones of the original post
This is government-funded, so they are going to be seeing the data at some time. What is to stop them from sending a ticket in the mail from the information they collected?
...don't question it!!!
Hopefully this will help getting the speeding jerks off our roads. Quite frankly, I wouldn't mind having completely remote-computer controlled cars in our lifetime.
The owls are not what they seem
Here in Montreal, they buried a bunch of sensors into the ground under the major highways. These sensors track in realtime the flow of traffic, so you can have an instant glimpse at the entire network's traffic status, and find out where to avoid. For now it's a small portion of the roads, but it's already proven to be very effective. Can't wait until more roads have that and the map! See it here.
Wow... I can't say how much this kind of thing scares me. As an advocate for privacy, I don't want people to be able to follow my every move.
/me shudders
I realize, of course, that there are benefits of being able to track cars. Finding stolen cars, keeping unsafe drivers off the road, et cetera, but sometimes you have to sacrifice all these things for the rights of the individual. Our culture has a tendency to take ideas with good intentions and take them to dangerous extremes. Take bias censorship in schools, for example. There are extensive rules that publishing companies have in place so as not to offend children. It started in 1970 as a way to keep racism and homophobia out of schools, but is to the point where you can't mention, for example, a blind man overcoming his disability and climbing a mountain. According to these bias guidelines, that kind of statement could offend blind children.
What is the next step after this? Tracking devices implanted under the skin? Big Brother is watching you.
--Nycto
Rental car agencies are already exploiting GPS tracking devices for uncapped profit (eg. bouncing a $250 rental fee to $3.4k). I wonder how long it will take them to exploit this one so they can charge penalties for ... oh ... not using your blinker, leaving the dome light on when the car is off, and perhaps even for not flipping down the sun visors. Y'know, 5 minutes of harsh sunlight can really wreak havoc on unprotected automotive uphostlery, and possibly increase the maintenance cost for a vehicle by a full $0.000000005!!
A friend of mine was telling me a story about this guy he knows who owns some kind of service business. This guy got all his employees some new cell phones (or something, some kind of communication gear) with GPS built in. The first week he fired something like 2 people, one of whom was taking a nap somewhere (presumably) and the other of whom was found in a very very bad part of town -- apparently buying drugs.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Embed the sensors in the roads..
I use this every day to choose which way to go home (red on Decarie (the 15) is particularly bad).
S
Slightly offtopic, but speeding tickets in the US are issued to the driver of the vehicle, not the owner of the vehicle (like a parking ticket).
In Texas, many cities are "home-rule" cities which means they can sometimes enact laws which are not specifically prescribed or proscribed by the state. In the town I live in, they issue civil citations to the owners of vehicles caught by the red light cameras. By issuing a civil citation, the city finds it easier to skirt around due process. If you refuse to pay, then you'll find yourself at the receiving end of a criminal charge for failure to pay a civil fine levied by the city, rather than being held responsible for the offense under criminal statutes.
Here's another example: We have several toll roads where I live. I sold my car a few years back; in Texas, the tags go with the car. So of course,the lowlife I sold my vehicle to decide to rack up several hundred dollars in fines for running the toll gates. The toll authority issued me a civil fine of several hundred dollars based on photographs of the rear license plate of the vehicle! Had I not been able to prove that the vehicle was in fact sold (I had a bill of sale), I would have been held liable for the fines.
So yes, in some parts of the country you can receive a citation by simply owning a vehicle caught speeding, running red lights, etc.
Apparently they can. Gene Weingarten wrote an amusing piece in the Washington Post last week that describes his failed attempt to get out of just such a predicament using the defense you have suggested. It didn't work.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
Here's the question, though...
Would you drive a car with the intent of being monitored if it meant that your insurance company would give significant fee breaks or if the government gave rebates of some form?
If you start to put money into the equation, things start to seem more interesting than threatening, n'est-ce pas?
I watched when my Kenworth T600 was in the shop, thay hooked up a system the size of a laptop and had a complete report from speed to RPM's to brake use and pressure. It even showed air pressure to the suspension giving them an idea of how much weight was on each axle. Combined with the qualcomm on board they knew within 3 feet where and what I was doing every 15 min. with the company truck.
I'm told you are what you eat, does that mean I can be you by tomorrow with some A1?
Ok, monitoring the car can be good or bad. Here's a little story from the real world.
Someone had a very expensive car, the kind of car that cost a fortune to get a insurance for. So the car got a tracking device installed to get a lower insurance. These devices are normally intalled in different places hard to find unless you take the entire car apart and also has their own battery.
One day the police got a call from the company tracking these cars for the insurance company. The car appeared to had been stolen and was going down the freeway. The police got running updates of the location of the car. drove after it down the freeway and ended up "capturing" the thief in a parking lot by blocking the exits with police cars.
The "thief" turned out to be a family member not normally driving the car who had forgotten to disarm the alarm.
The alarm did not make any noise if not disarmed, it just sat there, sending the coordinates from a gps antenna through the cell phone network.
So the owner was happy to see that the alarm indeed worked but less happy about all the attention the Saturday shopping got.
The story said nothing about the price for this mistake.
I'm not saying that it isn't good to be cautious, but just because a technology can be used in a "Big Brother" way doesn't mean it will.
Yes it does, It's only a matter of time before the fed/state/local authorities start to supoena onstar.
As a matter of fact, they already DID subpoena OnStar or one of its clones. And not just to track the vehicle, but to use the phone function to BUG it. This came to light in the news media as a result of a suit by the service provider.
It seems the device is basically a cellphone (without a ringer and with a fixed number to call, and WITH a data connection to the car's computer). Inbound calls are silently accepted (the better to track stolen cars without alerting the thief and to unlock the door for customers who lock the keys in). Of course this makes bugging the occupants trivial.
The emergency signal is sent by transmitting a tone in the upbound voice channel. With a call permanently set up between the car and the FBI's tape recorder, the emergency service the company was being paid for couldn't be provided. (The tone would go to the tape recorder, rather than a call being made to the emergency service proder.)
When the FBI wanted to continue the tap after a month, the company sued to get them to release it.
(The news item carefully didn't mention which OnStar-or-clone company was involved.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way