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

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Renegade Lisp]

There used to be an ad here in Germany that showed a long row of cars, tightly packed after one another. Caption: "In principle, that's the right approach. Now everybody please go 240 km/h (150mph) at the same time."

It was an ad by the German railroad.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Martin Soto]

Don't worry. By the time this becomes a reality, simulators will be quite good. Indeed, you'll probably be able to drive in your simulator during commuting, while the computerized driving system in your car protects the rest of us from your mistakes.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[swillden]

Once you have a convoy of vehicles that can automatically drive within a safe stopping distance of each other

Also, the safe stopping distance between computer-controlled vehicles can be much, much shorter. Rather than relying on human reaction time to engage the brakes, which is at least a substantial fraction of a second in the BEST case, and well over a second in most cases, computers could coordinate velocity changes with sub-millisecond latencies. Each vehicle computer would have to know the capabilities of the vehicle, and some slack would probably be added for less than perfect road conditions, but stopping distances could be calibrated very precisely.

That, in turn, would mean that most of the time vehicles would be traveling close enough to draft off one another, which would make all but the lead vehicle substantially more fuel-efficient, even at much higher speeds. Some intelligent ordering based on vehicle size would help even more, though that would tend to place the largest (and generally most fuel-hungry) vehicles in the "trailbreaking" position where their fuel consumption would be high in order to improve the efficiency of the following vehicles.

I think your basic idea, a robot lane, is the most workable approach. Rather than trying to make cars smart enough to navigate safely when intermixed with manually-controlled vehicles, specific areas of the road would be designated for automatic controls. They'd still need to have some ability to detect manual vehicles in order to address situations where a manual vehicle improperly enters the automatic lane. Over time, as a greater percentage of vehicles acquire automatic control systems, a greater portion of the roads would be given to automatic control, until eventually major highways would be purely automatic.

Hopefully by that time, automation will have progressed enough that guidance can be added to smaller roads as well, safely handling a mixture of automatic and manual traffic. Over time, the manual traffic would probably dwindle to next to nothing anyway.

At some point, it's even likely that private ownership of vehicles would decline. Why own a car yourself if enough autonomous taxis are circling the streets, using smarter and smarter algorithms to make sure that there's always one nearby when you need it? Drivers are the largest expense of a taxi fleet, and eliminating them would make taxis very cost-competitive with private vehicle ownership. Or perhaps cooperative ownership would become the norm.

With fully automated roadways, I think bus and train traffic would decline. Fuel-efficient, automatically-convoying, publicly or cooperatively-owned cars would be cost-competitive with traditional public transport, with the flexibility and end-to-end delivery capability of automobiles. Automated cars would also eliminate parking problems. Even if your car was privately-owned, not a taxi, a public car or part of a co-op, the car could drop you off at your destination and then drive to a parking location, even if it happened to be some distance away. Or maybe your car could turn into a taxi that operates itself for your financial benefit while you're shopping. In any case, a few minutes before you're ready to leave, you'd call the car with your phone, and have it waiting for you when you emerge.

There are so many advantages to automated automobiles that it's an idea that absolutely will happen.