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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."
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.
So does that mean instead of emailed pron links my car will now just drive me to the smut shop on its own?