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The Future of In-Car Computing
Barence writes "PC Pro is running a collection of articles looking at the future of in-car computing technology. They discuss how smartphones will become the primary means of in-car entertainment, how satnavs will be integrated into fighter-jet style heads-up displays, and how cars will create wireless mesh networks that warn each other of upcoming delays and collisions. The also explore the issue of integrating driverless cars onto the roads. 'It's one thing having smart cars that can talk to each other and react accordingly, but if half of the cars are dumb, it's another issue.'"
So they are building in a "collision detection system" that I can hack and get the car next to me to drive off the road. Cool.
I rather like the idea of "dumb cars" being a factor now, because it means that when the "smart cars" or their users fail to be quite so smart, the cars around them can react without being able to communicate with them. It would be quite dangerous if they all operated on the assumption that every vehicle on the road was talking to them.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Some parts of india have a similar but lower tech problem - cars with disc brakes are unusual and can stop faster than cars, with the more common but less efficient, drum brakes. This tends to cause accidents
That was my sarcastic heading for the thought that immediately came to mind.
A Slashdot article on the first multi-lane triple-digit pileup involving emergency organ transplant couriers, a schoolbus full of nuns and orphaned AIDS children, an emergency response vehicle going in the opposite direction and a dozen container cargoes of inflatable Jesus sex dolls, all caused by a conflict between the rights infringement seeking subroutines of the vehicles' in-car computing technologies.
Then someone will try to be first to post a 'Crash' joke.
It's all fantastic until someone has to pay for it.
As good as cars are or could be, isn't it time to get rid of the worst part? ie, the human driver? Mass transit or whatnot is clearly superior to an infinite number of monkeys driving cars at the same time.
They discuss how smartphones will become the primary means of in-car entertainment, how satnavs will be integrated into fighter-jet style heads-up displays, and how cars will create wireless mesh networks that warn each other of upcoming delays and collisions.
I think smartphones will be a stop-gap entertainment-wise. Really, if the new cars will have wifi anyway they will just talk to your home network (when parked) and just download the entertainment to the onboard HDD. The heads-up satnav will be pretty cool, although I suspect that the mesh networking will require multiple driver inputs of a collision and the like instead of relying on sensors alone.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
After just having seen what information the iPhone stores without the users knowledge I don't want to know how much more information the future smartcar wants to store and give away to different companies and lawenforcement agencies. No thanks.
My '03 Pontiac has a heads-up display that shows my speed, and radio station briefly when I change stations. I went looking at new cars last year and didn't find a lot of models with the heads-up display. It's a great idea, and the technology has been available for at least 8 years, why isn't it as common as cruise control and interval wipers?
My car has a standard 1/8" plug for an external player to use the stereo but my wife's car came with an ipod socket which is useless as we don't have any ithings. I imagine the pressure on the car makers to include car stereos locking in to one or another proprietary format (probably the ipod type; I think I was lucky) and the consumer being really stuck.
...that seem to cause busloads to plunge off roads into canyons.
Well someone had to do it. Suppose a segfault would be just as bad.
Just give me a nice convertible with a 6-speed manual gearbox and the bare minimum of electronics needed to keep the engine running efficiently.
Driving a car should be interesting enough by itself, I'd rather drive than be a passenger in a driverless Googlemobile soaking up pre-made online entertainment
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Without a complete re-engineering, car MPG isn't going to be increasing. Nor, with traffic as congested as it is, does horsepower mattered as it used to.
So, what is left is making the ride more comfortable and safer. Because smaller modes of transportation are becoming more common (motorcycles, mopeds, bicycles, pedicabs), vehicles that have the ability to warn about stuff in blind spots are becoming more important, especially modern cars where visibility is impaired by the pillars airbags are stashed in.
Of course, a safe driver is a safe driver, but having a warning system so Jane Xanax who is on the cellphone and putting on makeup gets buzzed that if she is about to turn a motorcyclist into an organ donor, or that the beer tap on Joe Sixpack's dash cuts him off after four servings of Miller Light, before his BAC gets to the legal limit.
I am all for automatic driving cars that use a mesh network. This means freeways that can run at the max speed of the slowest vehicle, not the minimum speed of the most drunk, stoned, high, baked, moron on a cellphone. Taking the human equation out on the freeways is a good thing, as it allows for much higher vehicle density as opposed to having to deal with people's reaction times (or lack thereof).
...16-year-old girls everywhere driving around with Facebook on the heads-up display. You might as well install a keg in the trunk with the tap in the dash for all this will do to teen accident rates.
Such hacks are easily defeated by proper architecture. Most likely, automatic cars will have several levels of functions with firewalls between them. For example:
1) Low level - engine control.
2) Situational awareness - do not accelerate into pedestrians.
3) Global awareness - traffic patterns and navigation.
So hackers will only be able to influence the last level of the hierarchy. So they can route your car into an incorrect location, but they won't be able to drive it off the road.
.. an interface that doesn't suck, powered by a system that is faster than a circa '99 laptop.
Talking on cell phones while driving
Texting while driving
Watching vids while driving
Yes, that means you. And if the car is turned on and in a roadway, that counts, no matter what your excuse is.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Never mind that 30,000+ people die in motor vehicle
accidents every year in the US alone. Yes, let's not
pay attention to that despite the fact that it exceeds
the deaths caused by terrorism by at least an order of
magnitude, every year.
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
Let's provide the occupants of the car with even more
ways they can distract themselves from the driving,
so the road continues to be the most dangerous activity
the average person experiences. What a great idea !
I also foresee when cars will link to the one in front like a train. That will form a direct connection for communication, turning it into a longer car. Why that? Because the economy will improve with the proximity of the cars and the carrying capacity of the road will increase dramatically. As long as they get the linking to be a safe thing, safety should be improved because the chains will "think" as one and when it's your turn to get off, you disconnect and exit, back to regular car mode. And the others close up and continue on to their exit.
But I personally think that GSM GPS should be in all cars with all trips taken transmitted back to a central node. That node can look at actual traffic in real-time and route people based on the best way to get there. It could also take into account individual driving patters to give appropriate directions (give grandma a route with lower speeds because she drives slow) and the ability to modify routes in real-time for congestion and problems would greatly help. Timing lights based on cars approaching it, rather than poorly timed based on a 3-year old study, handling onramp metering with actual intelligence, rather than time of day, suggesting longer routes that will take less time because of avoiding congestion, and such will make such a system instantly increase the capacity of the roads and decrease fatalities.
Of course, it wouldn't be cheap, and piles of people would come out of the woodwork demanding their Constitutional Right to drive inefficiently...
Learn to love Alaska
the future of high roaming fees if tied to a phone and lot's of lock in and don't even think of going to canada or mexico with a us data plan.
What ever happened to *driving*? You know, going out for a drive. Automobiling. Motoring. Just driving, for pete's sake, keeping our concentration on the road.
Please no.
1. Fighter Pilots are trained to read their HUDs, and also trained (presumably) in how to ignore them when appropriate.
2. Fighter jets usually don't fly in super-tight formations (Blue Angels being the exception). Especially not in tight formations of hundreds or thousands.
SatNav should be restricted to passenger or vehicle-stopped usage.
"smartphones will become the primary means of in-car entertainment" ...and soon they will run on gas, and have steering wheels.
It's always nice when pundits predict stuff that's been happening for at least 5 years already.
Instead of spending all the time, effort, and high risk should there be a failure, on an auto-pilot to handles real world situations perfectly, why not focus on the easy wins. Over long highways and busy cities, build HOV like lanes designed just for auto-pilot cars. If the car has the technology, it communicates with a gate that allows the car to enter the physically separate lane. When you get to the end of the special lane (or to your exit), you take control of the car before it lets you exit back on to the existing roads.
Include the technology for automatic valet parking that could be a seller for high end/big city areas, and you start the adoption process gradually. Even better is if the car can self-dock with a charging station while you're not using it. Companies like zipcar could purchase vehicles with the technology to get through rush-hour on the special lanes, and then the cars would reposition to high demand areas by themselves. Or the city could purchase vehicles and use them as an individual mass transit option that doesn't require building tracks, high voltage power lines, train stations, and the train cars.
For the paranoid, they don't have to give up control or even buy a car with the technology in it. But for the rest of us that would like to have our car drive at an optimal fuel efficient speed without any traffic jams while we read a book or talk on the phone, we can choose to trust the technology.
Check out Tesla's new Model S interface. It's pretty cool. Coincidentally, I interviewed with them today to work on the project. They shot me down like a bad of bricks. Tough cookies, those ones.
You hit upon a point there. Right now, stoplights and other traffic control mechanisms are used as a revenue generating function first thing, controlling the flow of moving vehicles second. For example, in a lot of small towns, there is a sensor in front of their 1-2 lights. This is to ensure that the light is red, and possibly net the town either $200 for a citation, or perhaps a jackpot if there is a marijuana seed, and zero tolerance civil forfeiture laws get them a nice vehicle they can use.
Will cities give up this cash cow? Would be nice. However, most larger cities are more interested in building stadiums for their sports teams than actually doing much in the way of easing congestion.
I see an automatic car initiative coming from car makers, well-clued companies like Google, and countries like China that have 6 day, 1000 mile traffic jams and have governments with the cajones to do something about their infrastructure problems.
US cities don't give a flying fuck how long commuters wait on their roads -- there is little to no economic interest in actually doing anything about it. Of course, these same city planners refuse to do anything about downtown crime, so people who can afford to do so keep moving outward to more suburban areas in order for their kids to grow up thinking that encountering a stray in the neighborhood means a lost puppy, as opposed to a .45 cal bullet from a gang shootout.
Time will tell -- Google's initiative and other research is going to pay off big when vehicles can be moved along far more densely on roads than now. A side effect, assuming a non-corrupt city that actually might lay in the ground work -- allow people to sleep, read a book, or browse /. for the length of the commute, instead of having to be active and wary the whole trip time.
What is really going on is the automobile makers are announcing they have begun filing patents.
This is a continuation of the industrial patent game that has been played since the beginning of the auto industry.
The patent game is a game played between the auto companies. The payout of the game is membership and position in the global auto manufacturing hierarchy.
What kind of innovation, what software, what interface? Well the patent game allows only a spotty blend of best of breed and second best solutions.
Patents are these strange objects that confer the exclusive right to manufacture an invention for a limited period of time. For any manufacturer, patents promise guaranteed business.
I think the patent game should be changed using inspiration from the Creative Commons and Open Source and Free Software movement. The point to focus on is to require patents to be licensed on the same terms and the same price to all applicants. Equal terms for all is to address the problem of patents supporting manufacturing oligopoly and the complementary problem of the best of breed solutions being locked away for scores of years.
Another problem with the patent game is the toxic effects as patent holders grasp for extraordinary or highest possible profits. The unfortunate effect of owning a patent is to the patent holder, the only fair price is "all the market will bear". That monopoly inspired grasping is a really difficult thing to regulate or balance in respect to what is fair for the commons.
I don't think we understand what the OP is trying to explain to us. Perhaps if they could break it down into some kind of analogy that the community as a whole would understand...
Oh well. All this great technology and we won't have any oil/gas to use it.
Have fun with your sat nav with no satellites and no electricity in the "FUTURE"
With all the computers being shoe-horned into cars, truck etc. Why does one need to purchase an electronic gizmo that plugs into the car dash/engine compartment to diagnose the car. Just allow the diagnostics to be read off the driver's display. This is some keep-them-guessing game the auto manufactures have colluded with the auto repair dealers to NOT allow the user to know how his car is ailing.
.. to share my car's data with everyone. Radar detector, geiger counters, WiFi scanners, everything. Everyone else can have direct access to this information, streaming, live, while they mesh with me on the road. I would love to be able to do that. Send them slip statistics pulled from ABS or traction-control triggering, how fast my windshield wipers are going, or just plain water collector sensors, airspeed (for crosswind detection in winter,) the whole kit.
I would love to be able to build a reputation system too: when I cut someone off, they can stamp me as a dangerous driver. When I let someone in, they can stamp me as a courteous driver. "Courteous driver ahead." "Jerk behind me." I can feel comfortable driving in the middle of a pack of "thumbs-up" drivers, or I can be more cautious when I'm stuck in the middle of a pack of ragers (or people who just refuse to participate, period.)
This is exactly what we need, a situation in which the on board autodrive gets remotely taken over and holding you captive in your own car.
Theres already research into injecting virus into your cars on board computer as it is [url=http://hackaday.com/2011/03/17/researchers-discover-that-cars-can-be-hacked-with-music/]link[/url]
I will NOT bet getting this until I'm forced too by state law. (which, I will understand. This would help considerably with traffic on freeways and such. I just don't want it in MY car.)