"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

What hath the free market wrought?

[BitHive]

If this catches on in America some gear heads are going to explode.

Re:What hath the free market wrought?

[yukk]

Well considering the internet evolved from a government project I'd say there isn't going to be any heads exploding over this. Especially if it has military applications which it probably does. Reducing fuel expenditure is a tactical advantage and the vast majority of free market types still support the idea of the government fulfilling the role of national defense to some degree.

I doubt the military would use this, at least not overseas. Decreased fuel consumption isn't worth turning a bunch of small targets into one large target. An IED or RPG would go from hitting 1-2 Humvees to 3-6.

The national security benefit from reducing our domestic oil consumption by even 1% is pretty significant, though.

The US Army is already looking into something similar to this but not with the high-speed tailgating effect. They're using one lead driver to lead a group of radio-linked trucks so they can get several times the supplies moved with less exposure of personnel to hostile forces. I only did a quick search so here's what I came up with: http://www.controleng.com/blog/AIMing_for_Automated_Vehicles/14540-Robot_Convoy_Truck.php

road trains are stupid.

[girlintraining]

You're handing control over to another driver, who may very well decide not to brake and cause a five car pileup, or worse. Also, there's no way to know the mechanical status of the vehicle -- what if one of them blows a tire, or runs out of gas, or the engine seizes?

What you should do is create a dedicated lane that is controlled entirely by computer, and you program your exit/entry point at that time, and let the signal and control computers handle traffic management. If an unauthorized vehicle enters the lane, sensors will immediately detect it, alert nearby drivers (and disengage), and send the police to go catch captain speedy pants and send him to a pants-down facility. Computers also do a much better job of fuel consumption and control... I mean, it'd basically be a packet-switched network, but with cars instead of pieces of data. It's a relatively benign IT problem.

As well, vehicle breakdowns would be handled a lot better because the system would be tied directly to the onboard computer and navigation systems: Just like lorries/semi-trucks operating on the road today. Having spoken to a commercial truck driver, I can tell you that the computer often knows about mechanical problems before the driver does, and their systems are pre-programmed to alert a dispatcher, who will send a rescue/repair vehicle out in situ.

Re:road trains are stupid.

[swillden]

I've seen at least half-a-dozen deer on the roads in the last couple of weeks. How is this going to work when one decides to run right through the middle of the train?

Well, I imagine what would happen is that the driver about to hit the deer would brake hard. The computer would relay this braking information to the following vehicles so they would all brake at very nearly the same instant. The problem that arises is that different vehicles have different braking capabilities, so if the vehicle about to hit the deer can brake harder than one of the vehicles coming behind, then we'd end up with a collision, maybe even a chain of collisions.

Ideally, the vehicles in front should have their braking artificially limited so that it doesn't exceed the braking ability of any following vehicle. If that were done, then the computers could ensure that collisions in the train don't happen.

Train Wreck

[smitty777]

OK - imagine this scenario: a train is driving along, and something happens to car number 2/8. Hit by another car, flat tire, accidentally leans on the joystick, whatever. The car veers out of control, unlinking cars 3-8. So now you have six cars being manned by people who were sleeping/reading/eating/daydreaming 10 nanoseconds ago.

I'm just sayin, I don't think you could pay me enough to get in one of those trains. Mythbusters did an interesting piece on saving gas by drafting. You could save a great deal of gas, but at great expense to safety.

Re:I just hope...

[Wonko the Sane]

It sucks that this system even needs a professional driver to begin with. A better system would be fully peer-to-peer in that any two cars that happened to be traveling in the same direction could link up.

Of course that would break this company's buisness model, but it would make sense for the car manufacturers to implement it that way.

Re:Ummm (use actual trains)

[Orange Crush]

Designate the leftmost lane the "train lane." Hit a button on your dash, and it signals the train to make an opening for you, hand off driving control to the "conductor" and you get to cruise at 15mph above the posted speed limit--legally. When you approach your exit, it signals you to leave the train, and you resume manual control to get the rest of the way to your destination.

Sounds workable to me.