Nissan Exhibits IEEE 1394-Compatible Car

Dirak writes "High-speed IEEE 1394 optical fiber networks have gone off-road with new Nissan's prototype vehicle demonstrated this year's at 11th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems. The prototype is equipped with 7 cameras on the body and a 12-inch LCD monitor in the front and another in the rear seat area. Thanks to the in-vehicle IEEE 1394 LAN, which is capable of high-speed communications at 400Mbps via optical cable, the front and the rear seat monitors can display various information simultaneously, for example. The application of optical fiber also means that the weight of the cables can be reduced to about one-half the weight of a conventional wiring harness."

Comments

Re:Usefulness

[HeliosTrick]

How about number 6? 6. Playing high-speed driving games instead of actually driving. Actually though, your number 5 is already in existance. I had a '97 Pontiac Bonneville with a low spray tank level warning. I think with that much bandwidth though, there's no reason a car could be sensored out to the max. If only they'd toss on a mode so you could see what the check engine light really is...

Re:Big Wow.

[Digital_Quartz]

The article is quite light on details; is it just video sent over the firewire link, or is all car data sent by firewire? If it's the later, this could be quite an improvement. If you've ever had to pull out and reinstall a wiring harness, then you know you average car has 8 bazillion wires in it, all of which are unlabeled aside from some obscure color code. A single firewire jack on everything that needs data would be WAY nicer...

Of course, I doubt you could pull the requisite 15W to power brake lights from a firewire port. :P

Reality check people...

[Indy Media Watch]

Before we get too excited about weight reductions, increased technology or bragging rights, let's remember something.

Air-conditioning, power-steering and even ABS still aren't standard despite costing next to nothing at build time and being about as essential as you could get.

Manufacturers need to cripple cheaper cars to somehow justify the extra $100k plus you can spend on higher-end models. Otherwise people start saying why does this car cost twice as much when it isn't twice the car?

I suspect it will be a long time before we see this sort of thing in wide use.