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

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.

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?

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.