"Road Trains" Ready To Roll

clickclickdrone writes to mention that "road trains," a system linking vehicles together via wireless sensors, could soon be rolled out in Europe. The system is designed primarily for cutting fuel consumption, travel time, and congestion. "Funded under the European Commission's Framework 7 research plan, Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) is aimed at commuters in cars who travel long distances to work every day but will also look at ways to involve commercial vehicles. Tom Robinson, project co-ordinator at engineering firm Ricardo, said the idea was to use off-the-shelf components to make it possible for cars, buses and trucks to join the road train."

Comments

Re:Tailgating to the max

[jfengel]

Except that with this system, they don't need to be jammed. If everybody in the train presses the accelerator at once, knowing that the car in front of them will as well, everybody gets to move. You're not as limited by the following distance required by an unpredictable human driver and the unpredictable circumstances ahead.

Reducing inter-car distance reduces the amount of road you need because you put more cars on the same amount of pavement, and the same highway functions as a much larger road. But it only works if you get the humans out of the loop.

Of course it also provides opportunities for truly spectacular failures.

Re:Train Wreck

[nutshell42]

OK - imagine this scenario: a large number of very intelligent specialists work for years on this idea and the necessary tech is implemented in every European car and noone ever thought of the 100% obvious first-problem-any-person-would-come-up-with-when-introduced-to-this-idea problem smitty777 discovered with the vast power of his uber-brain. European roads then become deathtraps, depopulating the continent like it's 1349.

I'm just sayin, every /. article with new ideas gets swamped by people stating absolutely obvious problems as if the people working on that project were all functionally retarded. I said the same thing just a few days ago but this article really brought the geniuses out of the woodwork like I haven't seen in some time.