EU Reserves a Frequency For Talking Cars

Iddo Genuth writes "The European Commission has recently decided to reserve, across Europe, part of the radio spectrum for smart vehicle communications systems. The decision is part of the Commission's overall fight against road accidents and traffic jams, and the hope is that vehicles' developers will create wireless communication technology that will allow cars to 'talk' to other cars and to the road infrastructure providers."

Comments

Denial-of-service anyone?

[giles hogben]

Now you can phish my car...

Still waiting for robot cars

[HungryHobo]

I think it's only a matter of time before computer controled cars come in.
Problem is that even if they wait till they can build ones which are 10 times safer than human drivers and have far fewer accidents the first time one glitches and someone dies there will be the technophobes screaming about how you can't trust machines and that the killer cars need to be made illegal.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[HungryHobo]

There's just so much time wasted on the road.
Link all the cars and let a computer control them and the moment the light goes green all the cars could accelerate at once rather than the first car moving off, then the second, then the third etc. On top of that throw in smarter traffic lights, better public transport systems(since there would be no need for drivers the money could be spent on more busses/trains) and being able to sleep on your way into work and you have a big winner

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[dam.capsule.org]

Gives a whole new meaning to Blue Screen of Death?

In today's cars, the engines are already computer controlled: for example, the fuel injector, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_injector . That does not mean it run on Windows or any full fledged OS.

If a protocol is some day implemented, it will run on special hardware and be developed using the same kind of procedure used in airplane software. Well, one might hope...

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Narphorium]

The real problem, as I see it, would be how you transition from a system of millions of non-robot cars to a system where all the cars drive themselves.

I've always imagined that there should be something analogous to the carpool lane except that it would be for robot cars. A driver would be able to manually pull up beside the "robot lane" and request to join it. Then the other cars would automatically open up a spot and he would be automatically merged into the robot lane.

Once you have a convoy of vehicles that can automatically drive within a safe stopping distance of each other you can ramp up the speed of the robot lane so that everyone gets to work much faster and they can even read the paper on the way there.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[HungryHobo]

Out of interest can anyone tell me why we still have human drivers on trains?
What exactly does the human do that's so hard do for a machine?
I mean it always seemed like such a perfect system for automation to me and wages are such a large cost. If you didn't need a driver for every train it would open it up to having far more small commuter carriages buzzing around.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Stray7Xi]

There's just so much time wasted on the road.
Link all the cars and let a computer control them and the moment the light goes green all the cars could accelerate at once

If all the cars are linked why have traffic lights? The car will know the route of all cars moving through the intersection, and the server could tell individual cars to speed up and slow down to go through the gaps of traffic (and even to make the gaps). Obviously there'd have to be a significant safety margin, but cars wouldn't necessarily even need to stop in a fully computerized system. As soon as you enter your destination it should have the whole route programmed to within seconds, only making slight modifications as other drivers enter destinations.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[niceone]

ones which are 10 times safer

The problem is that although robot cars could be proven 10 times safer than the average driver, nearly all drivers think they drive much more safely than the average driver.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Mutant321]

You could also avoid "phantom" traffic jams, where someone braking suddenly (even a small amount) can cause a ripple-back effect, resulting in jams for hours.

I think the militant driver lobbies will resist it strongly though.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[st0rmshad0w]

I can't stand the idea of robot cars. I ENJOY driving. I loathe being cargo, I don't even like being a passanger for more than a few minutes. And what about motorcycles?

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[bencollier]

Unfortunately, the price of gas/petrol/energy is likely to make commuting by car uneconomical long before the control systems are advanced enough to make this all possible. :-(

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a significant portion of drivers so unsafe, that the majority of drivers can be above average. That said, most drivers are careless enough to be quite unsafe in practice, even if they could drive safely. Last-second lane changes to make a light, illegal lane changes, and failure to use turn signals are excellent examples.

Pretty much all of the careless mistakes could (and would) be avoided by automated driving, mostly because the occupant would have to select a destination (and possibly optimal route) before starting their route.

Of course if we could get city planners and traffic engineers to allow for traffic control device communication things would be better, automated cars or not. I'd see a lot fewer wrecks if we had timers on stop-lights instead of the simple green/red with a vastly inadequate yellow in the middle.

Driving in the same county I manage to see yellow lights ranging from 2 seconds (which is illegally short) to about 6 seconds (which is quite optimal, but rare enough that it confuses people). It would be difficult to transition everyone, but a system that counted down the remaining time at a light would allow you to gauge your accelleration and braking. It would also optimize traffic flow, which would hopefully eliminate the necessicty of driving 30-50% over the speed limit in order to make a row of lights.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[polar red]

compare : 40000+ deaths on US roads. on avergae, in the last 10 years, there where only 400 terror-victims, That's only 1% of that number ...

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Opportunist]

Fog is no problem until the first car hits something unexpectedly because even a computer with top notch sensors and zero reaction time can't react to a deer jumping in front of it. Even computers can't change the laws of physics and breaking from 200 to zero in half a yard.

And if they somehow figure out a way to do that, it certainly ain't much better than crashing for the human inside. Decelerating from 200 to zero within a few yards IS actually much like hitting a brick wall head on.

High speed wireless

[Iamthecheese]

Ad-hoc vehicle-to-vehicle connections that can be hacked without vehicles crashing and are: Fast, Prioritizable, ("my brakes are broken" is more important than "I would like to turn left in 50 meters") robust, standardizable, platform independant, extendable, and don't depend on a vehicle ID. What protocol is that?

Re:High speed wireless

[HungryHobo]

Please god let the open source crowd get there before the manufacturers pull a VHS/Betamacs competition between their own protocols.
Last thing I need is my car crashing because the section of road I'm on only runs a different manufacturers protocol.

Where's my flying car?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I was promised a flying car!

Seriously, it's nice (and more than a little surprising) to see a government body do something so forward-thinking. We'll probably see fusion plants (in another 10-20 years ;-) before we see anything like fully robotic cars. Every year we talk here about the DARPA Grand Challenge, and that's just for a single vehicle, albeit off-road. Still, we're likely to see incremental uses of this kind of technology, particularly combined with GPS: tailgating prevention, traffic jam avoidance, gapers delay prevention (yay!), emergency vehicle path-clearing, etc. Kudos to the EU for reserving a chunk of the spectrum now, rather than later.

Re:Too much computer stuff in cars..

[anexkahn]

Thats why you should install Linux on it :)