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When Will the Automotive Internet Arrive?
DeviceGuru writes "European researchers are developing a cooperative traffic system, known CVIS (Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems), comprised of vehicle-, roadside-, and central infrastructure-based communications hardware and software, including vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) wireless. Among other capabilities, cars communicate with each other and with 'smart traffic signals' to smooth the flow of traffic and avoid accidents, or with 'smart traffic signs' to avoid dangerous driving conditions. The CVIS project is in the midst of undergoing field trials in Europe, and Audi has recently deployed 15 test vehicles in a similar project. The ambitious vision of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) includes goals such as reduced traffic congestion and fuel consumption, enhanced safety, and improved driver and passenger comfort. Ultimately, the developers envision a sort of Automotive Internet."
I sense a great disturbance in the force, as if dozens of anti-virus executives where salivating all at once.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If they're smart, they'll build it out on IPV6.
(Those who consider this to be obvious should remember that the government is involved.)
It is bad enough I worry about the script kiddies hacking my work computers. I can't imagine having to worry about then getting into my drive-by-wire systems which is why I'm stuck on driving old cars.
s/Audio/Audi/
The CVIS project is in the midst of undergoing field trials in Europe, and Audio has recently deployed 15 test vehicles in a similar project.
I believe you mean Audi. From the article:
Audi has been conducting research into intelligently controlled traffic for several years in a project known as “travolution.” Among other objectives, the project aims to enable cars to communicate with traffic lights in order to provide smoother traffic flow and reduced CO2 emissions. The company last week released a statement describing the project and reporting on its progress.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
So much for the "Don't text and Drive" billboards, now we'll have don't "4Chan and Drive" or "/b/ and Driving = Death you friggin B'tards"
Sheldon
there is a small problem with the current aproach: until "every" car gets the system installed, it's nearly useless. The protocol need to "know" that every other vehicle is going to act accordingly its specification. The false sense of security these devices can provide is very dangerous in case a car break the rules (not only by malice, just think in a malfuction like the infamous toyota) because the react time will be reduced ("The car from the back is too near, lets send a message to brake", "Ups, no response, maybe an interference, lets try again", "wow, its must be broken, lets speed up, i'll send a message to the front car to speed too", "Ups, no r...CARRIER LOST"),
I hope the Automotive Internet never arrives. Why? Because of three issues: privacy, security and bugs. First, this system is basically a giant handout to authoritarians and fascists world wide. One of the goals of all governments that don't care about privacy is to track every private car. They know that measure has to be phased in gradually, so we need to fight against every step of the way. Second, security is a huge issue. We know that we can never provide a %100 percent secure desktop platform - so how in the world are we going to provide a secure automotive platform? Third, bugs are going to be a huge problem - see the Toyota situation. If we have 100 million lines of code, and we have 1-2 bugs per thousand lines, we get 100-200 hundred thousand bugs in the car's software. It's surprising that we don't have more cars flying down the highway uncontrollably. I hope we have less computers in cars in the future, maybe even none if we really could. It'll be tough but it would save a lot of money and a lot of hassle.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
I'd always assumed everyone would have to be plugged into an automated system, but actually, maybe it only takes a relative few cars. In fact, if you just drove a line of cars side by side along the freeway at the speed limit so that nobody could pass them, and just kept such barriers every 10 or 20 or 30 miles, then I think it would help to eliminate the incentive for everyone to act so crazy to gain 30 seconds' advantage, thereby causing congestion. I've always thought it was the lange changes and sudden maneuvers that cause the most problems in traffic.
Currently hooked on AMP
At some point, it might make more sense to reduce congestion by building enough roads with enough lanes for the cars.
Smoothed and improved traffic flow can be observed whenever and wherever traffic signals cease operating. Assuming this new system has more downtime than the current traffic lights system, the new system will indeed improve traffic flow.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
And I hope I am not close to a road on that day too.
Why is technology the solution to congestion?
How about get all the cars off the road, replace with smaller vehicles, eliminate the need for so much road use and mandate that office hours be flexible and staggered.
Also, overpopulation (be it overall country levels or specific centralised areas) isn't helping. You can't keep building roads and then not expecting them to fill up.
Or just the small bit of programming that lets my iPhone know when it is in my car?
Then it can give me all that data and I don't have to buy the expensive, soon obsolete hardware in the car.
Congratulations, you've just created a system that guarantees there'll be at least one road-rager who'll work his way up to the rolling roadblock, and swerve to the left or right when either (a) the rightmost car in the roadblock exits the freeway, or when (b) the left-lane car in your roadblock passes the roadblock in preparation to exit the freeway, because the solid jam of cars behind him guarantees he can't exit the freeway by slowing down.
For bonus points, you've also guaranteed a massive pile-up when, not if, the road rager screws up his move to break free of the pack.
How about a system designed to reduce turbulence by encouraging laminar flow? Like a really annoying buzzer that goes off when a driver is (a) in the left lane, (b) someone's gaining on them, (c) there's more than 10 seconds' margin ahead of him and either ((d) more than 5 seconds' margin forward and behind in the lane to his right, or (e) he's not gaining on traffic in the lane to his right.))
The first word here is "Cooperative". Anything involving the Internet that requires two or more agents (people, software, whatever) to "cooperate" ends up as a great big security exposure and people lose savings, credit and who knows what else.
So we are thinking somehow that "cooperative" will work with 2000lb vehicles traveling on highways at over 60MPH/100KPH? Somehow I have a feeling that this will work out about as well as SMTP is working for us now.
When the Internet was a few colleges, Bell Labs and the US Military coupled up SMTP worked fine, as will a trial of this. Scale to 50% of the vehicles on the road and you will have Some Random Hacker thinking it might be cool to "cooperate" a bit more enthusiastically than everyone expects. And then you have the equivalent of spam on the highways.
Hitting a can of SPAM at 60MPH is going to create quite a mess, as will any sort of "cooperative" sort of stuff on highways.
Our car analogies will become apt!
I hope never. I know *I* will fight it to the end. Computers do have their place, but sticking one in every nook and cranny 'just beacuse' is irresponsible.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've always thought it was the lange changes and sudden maneuvers that cause the most problems in traffic.
"Merging" seems to be the biggest problem in my area. ( yes its a form of lane changes, but in theory, 'controlled' )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hopefully NEVER.
For everything good that could come out of this, several somethings BAD will come out of it. Speed tracking for automatic tickets and insurance increases, and - NO TIN FOIL NEEDED - government tracking. The Brits will be the first to require this.
As soon as it's possible, the insurance companies will require this and jack your rates through the roof without it. As well, if your driving does not fit their statistical profile, your rates will goe up. As technology improves, if you take those right-turn-on-reds too fast, your rates will go up. Spend too much time in the "wrong" part of town? Your rates will go up.
The government will for sure figure out a way to leverage the information from this technology for some sort of tax increase.
There is no real benefit to having an Internet connected auto. Flying cars are a fantasy, road / highway technology has reached it's zenith.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I'm amazed that I seem to be the first one to say anything about minority report...
Assuming us arrogant bastards in the USA don't want to give up our cars (likely) and you can convince us to simply give up DRIVING our cars (NOT likely, perceived lack of control is one of the main reasons cited by people nervous of flying) such a system really would be the ideal. We'd likely have to black out all the windows though, because people tend to get nervous seeing other cars cross traffic with mere inches to spare while traveling at high rates of speed. The trick is not in creating the system to do it (no easy task in itself, mind you) but in getting it deployed, then accepted by the public. Being the arrogant bastards that we are, at least a couple of us will be convinced that we can do it better, or at least be able to program our own cars to do it better.
Because government information systems are so efficient, I am really looking forward to them being able to remotely control aspects of my car and know where I am and how fast I am going. Next up personalized predictive crime models with arrest powers.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
No really it is.
Thought experiment. You have a road. You can safely put a car along the road every 2 seconds. What is the capacity of the road? 1800 cars per hour.
You put a parking garage at the end of the road. it takes 15 seconds to get a ticket and enter the garage. What is the capacity of the road now? 240 cars per hour. You just cut road capacity to 13% of nominal and created a huge traffic jam. Welcome to reality.
Our traffic problems are created because we don't get cars off the roads fast enough when they get to their destination. What're need are lots of high bandwidth parking garages. Traffic lights and junctions also don't help at all.
Deleted
I use Berlin U bahn, S bahn and RE trains just about every day... One of the best, most efficient and comprehensive mass transit systems in the world. But they only carry a fraction of the journeys (about 5%) which are made in the areas they service (Berlin/Brandenburg). They simply could not cope with a 20 fold increase in usage and there's no realistic way they could be made to cope.
Take a look at Germany's passengerkm stats per mode of transport to see just how the different modes compare.
Deleted
So does that mean instead of emailed pron links my car will now just drive me to the smut shop on its own?
In a way, you are right. Idiots running side by side at the same speed causes people to figure out ways to get around them. Multiple-lane highways exist for a reason, and the *right* lane is the *slow lane* and the *left lane* is the fast lane. As near as I can tell doing as you suggest is a violation in all 50 states of the union.
BTW, truckers passing through Kentucky on I-75 (and probably elsewhere) were protesting the different speed limit for trucks and cars by lining up side by side at the border, and running exactly the speed limit all the way across. That resulted in absolute carnage as people tried to pass on the shoulder, and lined up for miles behind them. If your proposal were implemented, I would expect a huge increase in accidents as people got around the "blocker cars".
Traffic accidents are not caused by excessive speed to any great extent, they are caused by bad driving and discourteous driving - and your proposal is a classic example of both.
Brett
I think researchers have already found ways of compromising this.
America, Home of the Brave.
Multiple-lane highways exist for a reason, and the *right* lane is the *slow lane* and the *left lane* is the fast lane.
Except in Texas and England.
I researched a report on intelligent highway systems 25 years ago in college. They've been promising this shit forever just like fusion power and AI.
If any article deserves that tag, you think it'd be this one.
Instead of adding a cost to the car and creating a difficult-to-change integrated system in the car why not implement this on cell phones? Roll-out, scalability, retrofit, and changes all become easier. Also users would have more choice in participating (they could turn their phones off, or stop running the software.) The same software may also have good uses in other driving and non-driving settings (pedestrian detection, public transport, large crowds). Building a system into all cars sounds too monolithic and likely to become obsolete fast.
Putting sensors at the roadside would still be useful regardless of which approach is used.
Standards are nice, but this seems like a system that is going to need to evolve over time since it's never been tried before. Why wait years to find out what the problems are and then scrap a generation of hardware? Implement a system now on mobile phones that developers can adapt over time. Let developers compete. Once clear leaders emerge, then start thinking about standards and building it into cars (or maybe discover that it's better to leave it in the phones.)
And it would give suggestions on which way to go while recording data.(While the human actually controls the car the whole time.) I can see a few problems though. First off in this scheme alot of people would ignore the advice to go the way they want to go. However the big reason why people might ignore it is they might not trust it if they get bad advice a few times. I live in the Boston area and our "smart traffic" service has this problem. It often doesn't get updated for close to an hour. Since they don't put a real timestamp on the info it's always in your head that this data could be something like over an hour old, at which point it's useless. (Their web page theoretically has a time stamp. However it seems like much of the time the stamp automatically updates ever few minutes even if the report hasn't actually been updated for awhile.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Bla bla bla communism yadda yadda yadda 1984.
P.S. What about them niggers, eh?
Actually the right lane is the default lane and the left lane is for passing. If you aren't passing anyone or preparing for a left exit you shouldn't be in the left lane. It is a violation to do otherwise.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Google needs to do this with Droid and GPS, after all they have all the information in the world....
Wow! You just invented mass transit.
Whoops... except for that last one. ANONYMOUS single passenger vehicle traffic? Every car on the highway is required by law to bear a tag registered to its owner. We can agree the police don't know EXACTLY who is in every car, but you must also agree it is trivial for them to discover the identity of any driver in any vehicle when travelling public roads.
Well, at least trains are relatively anonymous... more so than cars, anyway.
We don't need smarter cars; we need smarter travellers, taxpayers, and politicians; We need more access to light rail transport.
The auto-drive system in that was rather vulnerable to l337 hax, causing traffic accidents and deaths.
"... I just got broadsided by a spambot..."
This will beat tapping on the brakes. Broadcast a few "I've just stood on my brakes" messages to the vehicles behind me and watch the antics ensue.
Have gnu, will travel.
If something like this were to be implemented, your location would always be known. If not to the public, at least to the "authorities".
I just do not see a practical way to keep the Big Brother aspects out of it, unless they were to build some kind of filter so that "the authorities" could not see personal information without a warrant or something. Heck, they could even set up a totally automated system to mail out speeding tickets. No police cars required.
I'll pass, thanks very much.
We'll need TOR for cars.
Have gnu, will travel.
Where you can elevate highways, build tunnels underground, and/or stack roads to increase the number of lanes. Seattle, Boston, Omaha, San Francisco and San Antonio, among others have this figured out
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
I like to call it the "passing" lane. If your not passing the car to your right then you need to get over to the right regardless of what speed your at. Pass or move over, thats it.
Mark
I think it would be loads better to push telecommuting over all this expensive rube goldberg computer controlled meatsack commuting. These are wild ass schemes that are ignoring the basic problem of physical commuting, which is the "necessity" thereof. How much is *really* necessary, and how much is just archaic holdover from the 1800s and 1900s office? Yes, people HAD to travel to the office then, because all the data was physical hard copy, all the communication was speaking directly to people or sending a snail mail or real high tech, a courier to the telegraph office. But *now*? WTF? Why are we still doing this by the millions and millions when it is all digital and can be done over wires and fiber? Why are we still insisting that people who sit in front of a computer screen have to commute daily to "the office" to do this? Aren't we past that quill pen era yet? And if they don't have to physically commute, shazzam, we don't have to waste money on these billion dollar massive corporate ego office towers either, another huge savings. Wouldn't it be cheaper to push better connectivity, run a lot more fiber, than to build more whizzbang commuter trains and computerized self aware vehicles and all that stuff just to sit in front of a computer? Isn't this the whole point of the internet in the first place, to allow communication of any type to be accomplished without having to physically move a human or a courier sack?
Since I totally agree with Jane Q. Public, I'll take that as a serious comment. The question is whether TOR-equipped cars will be ALLOWED on the roads. I'd guess not, because "it would compromise safety" but in reality because it would compromise Big Brother's ability to hand out speeding tickets. Bonus points for surveillance whenever they feel the "need".
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
You want to slide into the express lane? 3 occupants AND logged into the highway system.
How about anonymous car leasing by the mile? like prepaid cells now?
Will this also mean that the govt knows where I go all the time? And what speed I drive at?
BTW, truckers passing through Kentucky on I-75 (and probably elsewhere) were protesting the different speed limit for trucks and cars by lining up side by side at the border, and running exactly the speed limit all the way across. That resulted in absolute carnage as people tried to pass on the shoulder, and lined up for miles behind them. If your proposal were implemented, I would expect a huge increase in accidents as people got around the "blocker cars".
not only that, but please remember we are talking of "intelligent" cars. this means they will read the speed limit from somewhere (wifi-broadcat/video feed, whatever).
now combine that with stupid countries like italy where they put a 30km per hour sign if any work is done near the sreeet, even if the road itself is not touched, and i a can guarantee 3 times more traffic and accidents.
o, and workers always forget those signs...
Because, you know, being able to break the law without anyone noticing is more important then reducing the number of people who die on the road, yes?
If you can build such a system, you can build it so it is anonymous. Right now, from what I gather, they are mostly concerned with replacing the visual signals you already have (turn lights, brake lights, etc.) with more detailed data communications, so instead of me knowing that your car is braking, my car knows why and how hard your car breaks.
Yeah, huge privacy problem, I see that.
Frankly, half of the comments in here are posting pseudo privacy warnings, when what they are really saying is "I want to speed and drive like an asshole, and I don't like that it'll become easier for others to notice".
Some big top-down plan isn't going to work, it never does.
Who here has their car set up to sync their podcasts from their driveway? I'd like to start there, and I think there's probably a huge market for it. A Mini-ITX PC with smart power control is probably part of the mix. I'm sure this isn't an original thought, I've been wanting it for a half-dozen years but have been too cheap/lazy to code it up.
But I suspect somebody here has already posted a HOWTO...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Now all the traffic signals wont work because they'll all be watching porn!
Excessive speed may not be the cause of a 90% of accidents, but excessive speed reduces the manouverability of a vehicle: it's ability to steer, and it's ability to stop (at an exponential rate), the amount of reaction time a driver has to avoid a hazard, it can make more vehicles become involved in the crash, and it increases the possibility and number of fatalities from a crash.
Do you own a mobile phone? It locates your whereabouts far more of the time than tracking your vehicle does.
How about setting the limits to government monitoring in the same ball-park as mobile phones.
I've also tried to think of a way to design on and offramps to reduce this problem. We need a third dimension -- the problem seems too constrained in 2D. All you can do is add space between vehicles, strenuously enforced.
Currently hooked on AMP
No, my proposal would not be "idiots" it would be official cars whose job it is to remove the incentive to speed around and get that last few seconds of advantage. You'd have to actually plan your trip at the legal speed limit. Now you can argue that the speed limit is too slow, but if passing people to go 80 MPH only made a small difference in your time because of my "asshole brigades," then it might just clear up traffic and make commute times bearable.
Currently hooked on AMP
This is not true in all jurisdictions.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The question is whether TOR-equipped cars will be ALLOWED on the roads. I'd guess not, because "it would compromise safety"
My 30 year old Toyota was retrofitted with the requisite networking technology. Trouble is; the electrical system is kind of flakey and the fuse powering all that electronic crap keeps blowing. Thank goodness I still remember how to drive in manual mode.
Have gnu, will travel.
No, the biggest traffic problems are caused by not enough road for the number of cars.
"Just got fishtailed by a Porsche. I'll check his V2V at the next stop light and give his driver a scare"
http://www.intellidriveusa.org/
bah! i'd be happy if they would connect the red-lights
with each other.
see! typical case of rolling the burden onto the
voter. wiring red-lights together and synchronizing
them would be a job for the government.
but i guess the government guys in the big fat mercedes and bmws
have some nifty device which will change the redlight
to green at the push of a button anywayzzzzzz
And that points up another problem -- what happens when a generation is raised to depend on BigBrothermobile, and CANNOT fend for themselves when it breaks?? Big Brother could cripple any contrarian or otherwise disapproved movement simply by disabling the appropriate vehicles.
Or... the road out of the city is clogged. No more traffic is allowed. Your vacation will take place in another direction; too bad about your hard-to-get reservations in the now generally off-limits national park. Or the emergency evacuation will simply not happen. Make up your own scenario, anyone can play!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
i suspect the problem is not the number of dimensions, but the drivers involved.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Wouldn't bother me nor any other bikers out there.
Of course, if you could keep peak traffic flowing at the speed limit (and not drastically below it), that'd be a plus too!
Sauce: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7370998653497771170#
There's always the GOOD and BAD from ever technological advance, it's the 'technology paradox' IMO. There could be a middle ground that everyone is missing, what about an OPT-IN approach. In this OPT-IN approach, people who opt-in would receive the benefits of the new CVIS system either through special lane assignments (a la HOV) or purpose-built roads (a la toll roads). Both of these are opt-in 'systems' and offer the vehicle operator the choice.
These systems would be options or even installed by default yet the owner would choose to opt-in or not. The trick would be this opt-in is not a daily choice but something one would do either annually or bi-annually (like registration or registration renewal). One would receive a code to 'log in' or authenticate. Data collection should be transparent meaning the vehicle owner has the ability to view the data collected. Data archival would also require some thought -- ie, can it be made anonymous in some way like removing the unique identifier yet allowing the data to survive for analysis & trending needs.
Much to do here yet let's not be completely Orwellian.
Regards, Peter J Strifas