"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: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