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DoT Proposes Mandating Vehicle-To-Vehicle Communications
schwit1 sends word that the Dept. of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has given notice of a proposal (PDF) for a new car safety standard that would require vehicle-to-vehicle communication equipment in all new passenger cars and light trucks. The NHTSA thinks this will facilitate the development of new safety software for vehicles. They estimate it could prevent over 500,000 crashes (PDF) each year. "Some crash warning V2V applications, like Intersection Movement Assist and Left Turn Assist, rely on V2V-based messages to obtain information to detect and then warn drivers of possible safety risks in situations where other technologies have less capability. ... NHTSA believes that V2V capability will not develop absent regulation, because there would not be any immediate safety benefits for consumers who are early adopters of V2V." The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns.
I'm already quite good at vehicle-to-vehicle communication.
Official Vehicles should have a special V2V tag so we can be warned of firetrucks coming around blind corners and police hiding behind billboards.
Let's trigger all the cars to slam on their brakes with the Gameboy.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Soon there will be a mod so you tell the guy who just cut you off, "fuck you, you fucking fuck, right in the fucking fuck-fuck-fuck" at max volume using their cabin speakers. I'll probably hear it a lot.
the day all the traffic laws are repealed.
no vehicle or onlooker would ever transmit incorrect/invalid/corrupted location, direction or speed information. and no driver would jam on the brakes the moment the warning system issues an alert. right?
This will be a great safety boon for motorcyclists. If that inattentive driver's car will let him know I'm coming, then he won't turn directly into my path.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
They estimate it could prevent over 500,000 crashes each year.
How many years from now? I'm driving a 1994 truck. I don't personally know anyone who has ever purchased a new vehicle.
This will simply open up new attack surfaces on unsuspecting vehicles.
But also sounds like the bridge that connects one of the major avenues of exploitation from the movie Dragon Day ...
If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll give you sources - Chomsky on The Big Idea
talking on a mobile 'phone while driving was supposed to be dangerous ... so now we will all have to do it ???
> transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns.
We already had this debate when they mandated installing lights on vehicles, which also transmits the location of a vehicle and raised privacy concerns. In the end, the ability to not crash into invisible cars beat out the privacy concerns, IIRC.
Oh look, Protesters. Let's brick their car with V2V.
I'm sorry. I have ZERO confidence that V2V will not have a back door for abuse by authorities, never mind the hacker/crook people.
It would have to be passive and have an OFF switch.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
"The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns" Hardly a secret is it? It's the chuffing big bit of metal about to slam into your vehicle. Look out the windows and there it is.
Cars cannot trust communications coming from other cars. It doesn't matter how many signed certificates and whatever bullshit you throw at the problem, there is no way that a car I'm driving should ever trust any information coming over the airwaves.
I can't text and drive but my car can....
Send a false (true once it actually is transmitted) message I am not stopping so you'd better stop.
Second hack is... Police car is coming so pull over and stop.
I can finally get where I am going in Seattle. Yay!
It's not a bad idea, provided that there's no concept of a conversation. There's no negotiating or acknowledgement that needs to happen, simply a car announcing what it's doing.
Baking in more than this to the spec or implementation will only fuck it up.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Let's start a pool to guess when the first accident due to a hacked communications system will occur.....
Seriously
Make sure the police kill switch is implemented without any meaningful security.
This is the wrong way to go about it. The government should not be involved in this at all.
Mandate the standard not the use of the technology. i.e. "IF you are going to implement this safety feature, communication with the other vehicle must happen via RF (or whatever) on X frequency. Pulse Y indicates speed, pulse Z indicates direction..." etc...
Thankfully, we have the most open and technologically-savvy Administration in history. He uses e-mail like, OMG, daily (!!11!) and has, like, the most Twitter-followers of any US President too. Seriously, like, ever!..
Nothing to worry about... Our lives, rights, and freedoms are in good hands. Please, don't hate.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
A 'warning system' to supplement the drivers' own sense of situational awareness would be fine. However: No 'taking control of the vehicle from the driver' for any reason. Anything that facilitates drivers to drive more safely is good thing. Similarly I'm all for better driver training and better driver testing.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I will be jamming any communications I did not configure and authorize
I actually have always thought that vehicles should all have a protocol such that they talk to other vehicles within a certain range - so I'm all for this technology as long as it isn't server based. That is, i'll be pissed if all the cars communicate to some server that is a go-between. It should work as a direct link to whatever the signal range is, and then i have no privacy concerns, as anyone around you already knows that you're there.
Just info could be acceptable, although unfortunately even that can get horrifyingly exploited, whether used by cops to slam your brakes when going at highway speeds to avoid an illusory incoming truck.
But that won't be how it's used, will it. No, the potential for abuse is so great here that NSA, CIA and police everywhere in the united states are turning their offices into that southpark scene with randy marsh at the end of the "no internet" episode, when he finally sneaks himself some porno, just thinking about how they're going to fuck people up with impunity through this.
I cannot imagine this technology resulting in any sort of good when compared to what will be done TO people through it.
I have frequently wished there was a reliable way to tell somebody "your tail light's out," "your blinker's on," or best of all, "stop tailgating me, you stumpcock."
A "tattle on that vehicle" button would also be nice.
"The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns. "
For the purposes of reducing accidents and facilitating things like lane changes, there's no reason for the location to be transmitted more broadly than a few hundred metres around the transmitting vehicle, nor for either the transmitting vehicle or receiving vehicles to store that location for more than 10 minutes or so. I'm not too worried about the impact on privacy if that were the case. And I'm expecting car manufacturers to go with the cheapest possible solution which meets regulation, so they certainly have no interest in installing the kind of equipment needed to broadcast location beyond 100m or so, and lost of interest in resisting regulation which goes beyond that.
Is this the same DOT that for years defied US legislation mandating backup-cameras becoming standard equipment in vehicles?
In 2008, Congress passed a law (signed by GW Bush) requiring the DOT/NHTSA to put together rules requiring backup-cameras in cars. The law set a deadline of 2011 for the DOT. And 2011 was just a deadline, so they could have implemented the rule in 2009 if they wanted. Instead they put off the setting the rule until just about six months ago in 2014. It won't be finalized until 2015 and won't take effect until 2018.
The reason DOT dragged their feet? The stated reason was that they needed more time to calculate the cost-benefit ratio of prevented deaths caused by cars backing up. Never mind that Congress already decided that matter, and that most of the measurable benefit is not going to come from personal injury, but from property damage averted when you don't dent your car backing out a parking spot because you can see how much space is behind you in the video-monitor. The unstated reason is that mandatory backup cameras would cost PROFIT for Detroit auto manufacturers.
And keep in mind these are lousy backup cameras which are mature, uncontroversial, and easy-to-implement tech. This V2V tech is still under development.
So what's the deal with this rush to mandate V2V? Is this Obama trying to establish legacy?
I've always thought it would be cool to have an open bi-directional sound channel where anyone within 500 ft could talk to, listen to, warn other drivers in other nearby cars etc. You don't have to tune in... but i bet many people would be on it.
Comments like yours piss me off so much. You ignorant motherfucking white people all need to fucking die.
On the surface, it's not a bad idea. But you don't have to dig deep at all to bump into lots of smaller and bigger problems. One of the most trivial ones is that we'll start to rely on this V2V communication being available and that suddenly a burnt out vehicle right around the bend becomes that much more deadly, as in causing "easily preventable" loss of life, just because the beacon in the thing wasn't working. At the very least you have to discount that "lives saved" guesstimate (and it's a very wild one by necessity) for that, possibly considerably.
Then there's the problem that you already cannot trust state actors not to abuse the information. We know this because they already have repeatedly demonstrated to be entirely untrustworthy with loads and loads of wilfully collected data without warrant, "just in case". Next they'll mandate government-accessible remote shutoffs and like trickery. Sure, seems like a good idea, but it also opens up the door to abuse, and someone will go there. How many "potentially dangerous" car chases cut short to justify a remote-shutoff-caused deadly highway rear-ending? Go on, we're making trade-offs here, tell us your preferences in numbers. If you can't do that, you're not just paving the road to hell, you're insisting on doing it blindly.
And that again is before considering security measures, since LE presumably has legally-mandated access. That they'll never ever possibly will abuse cross their fingers honest, like how that is so totally true in everything they ever do. But suppose that's really true, the next stop is corporate fleet management access, personal remote access (vengeful ex-SO, anyone?) or unauthorized access combined with the automotive industry's track record (rfid tyre pressure sensors, anyone?), and so on. This really just scratching the surface.
In those, and more, senses, it's "because we can" starry-eyed wishful silver bullet thinking. We can no longer afford this, haven't been able to afford it for a while, and the price is getting steeper all the time. Yet we keep on going down the same path. Guess we'll have to learn the hard way, then.
.. but only in binary.
shocked i tell you that California didn't think to mandate this first! we are slacking.
Prediction for 2019 (made in 1999):
"Most roads now have automated driving systems - networks of monitoring and communication devices that allow computer-controlled automobiles to safely navigate"
wikipedia
Anyone got your ears on?
I fear a resulting increase in complacency / lack of attention which bodes badly for cyclists and pedestrians.
I see you want to make a left turn. I think you better start spinning donuts on that flying bridge instead, with the engine at full-tilt boogie.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Just yesterday, I was driving on I-80 in Reno. There was a lot of traffic backed up (Burning Man) at one exit that I didn't see and had to come to a screeching halt (fortunately stopped in time and they guy behind me was able to swerve into the next lane).
If I had had V2V, I theoretically would have had warning of the problems in time to avoid the panic stop.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
People wonder how we'll ever convince Americans to give up ownership and switch to rented, self-driving cars...
We'll do it by:
a) Jacking up insurance rates on people who still want to drive
b) Jacking up the price of vehicles by mandating expensive equipment
In 30 years, you won't be able to afford a car, much less afford to drive it. I'm not making a moral judgement here, I just think it's bound to happen.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
I'm sure that the intent is to allow vehicles to pass around packets of info about heading and velocity. I immediately thought about proposing adding a packet type to the specification that contained the message: "Get off the road, asshole!".
in retrospect, it is probably for the best that I am not a DoT engineer....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I'd love for people to be able to park without scraping their front bumper against my door.
In terms of safety impacts, the agency estimates annually that just two of many possible V2V safety applications, IMA and LTA, would on an annual basis potentially prevent 25,000 to 592,000 crashes, save 49 to 1,083 lives, avoid 11,000 to 270,000 MAIS 1-5 injuries, and reduce 31,000 to 728,000 property-damage-only crashes by the time V2V technology had spread through the entire fleet.
These figures are quite amusing ... how can the range of estimates vary by several orders of magnitude while concurrently expecting anyone to take anything you have to say seriously?
A malicious driver only needs to transmit fictitious messages while driving to cause traffic jams, or even worse cause traffic accidents.
An interesting person may force traffic to part for them like some kind of modern day hacker Moses.
Here's a more technical discussion from NHTSA. At page 74-75, the data elements of the Basic Safety Message I and II are listed. The BSM Part I message doesn't contain the vehicle ID, but it does contain latitude and longitude. The BSM Part II message has the vehicle's VIN. So this is explicitly not anonymous.
Back in the 1980s, when Caltrans was working on something similar, they used a random ID which was generated each time the ignition was switched on. That's all that's needed for safety purposes. This system has a totally unnecessary tracking feature.
Most of this stuff only works if all vehicles are equipped. It also relies heavily on very accurate GPS positions. However, there's no new sensing - no vehicle radar or LIDAR. The head of Google's autonomous car program is on record as being against V2V systems, because they don't provide reliable data for automatic driving and have the wrong sensors.
If something is going to be required, it should be "smart cruise" anti-collision radar. That's already on many high-end cars and has a good track record. It's really good at eliminating rear-end collisions, and starts braking earlier in other situations such as a car coming out of a cross street. Mercedes did a study once that showed that about half of all collisions are eliminated if braking starts 500ms earlier.
V2V communications should be an extension of vehicle radar. It's possible to send data from one radar to another. Identify-Friend-Foe systems do that, as does TCAS for aircraft. The useful data would be something like "Vehicle N to vehicle M. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 110 relative. No collision predicted". A reply would be "Vehicle M to vehicle N. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 205 relative. No collision predicted". That sort of info doesn't involve tracking; it's just what's needed to know what the other cars are doing. It's also independent of GPS. Useful additional info would be "This vehicle is a bus/delivery truck, is stopped, and will probably be moving in 5 seconds.", telling you that the big vehicle ahead is about to move and you don't need to change lanes to go around it.
How about we just implement a system that when a vehicle brakes hard it also send out a low power directional signal (to the rear) that reads "Hard Braking, #1 vehicle, ".
Then every vehicle that receives it replies with "Hard Braking, #2 vehicle, " and every vehicle that receives it replies with "Hard Braking, #3 vehicle, ", etc. Then at some predetermined cutoff point (number dependant on the vehicle's speed) the vehicles stop propagating the message.
The point of the random number is so that your vehicle can ignore multiple receipts of the same braking event while not identifying the vehicle.
That should cover the vast majority if situations that you want your vehicle to warn you about.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
So much so that court cases were thrown out due to the use of GPS devices installed in cars.
This sounds even more unconstitutional.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A more interesting person would make a video of cars pulsing to a soundtrack, after a successful cascade hack, and upload the vid.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Forget the happy horseshit about super-safe robot cars. We don't have those, and they won't work when we do. This is about the ability to track all the vehicles in the world, either by private entities who will backdoor the info to government and political groups, or straight-up security force tracking. Not just here, but all over the world. We are building turnkey police state infrastructure. If you can't grasp this, you might want to contemplate how privileged you are not to ever feel endangered by cops or polical opponents like Scientology or the Moonies. Do not give the monkeys the key to the banana plantation. Once you are in a worldwide prison, there is no escape.
Cars cannot trust communications coming from other cars.
This is an awful idea even without the idea of human malice. With it, it's an Orwellian nightmare mated to a Murphyesque fuckup. Cars which depend on communications from other cars cannot in fact be said to be self-driving. They're part of a hive mind, and if there's sickness in that hive, it's going to affect them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Its all about destroying privacy because they definitely don't give a flying fuck for general population.Privacy sit in back
Smoke signals.
Have gnu, will travel.
No, just no.
very much a step in the wrong direction.
There you are on a public road plainly displaying a license plate and you have some expectation of privacy! That is just plain nuts. Obviously people in public view are not in any form of private state. A license plate makes an even more public declaration of where you probably are. This nonsense has gotten so off base that people have no clue as to what private really means.
Considering half of the road deaths are pedestrians and cyclists, and the deaths are caused by drivers playing with their phones etc, I don't think this is the right way forward towards improving safety.
"Pedestrians are 1.5 times more likely than passenger vehicle occupants to be killed in a car crash on each trip"
Making motor-vehicle safer for the driver has not helped pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns.
Yeah, because V2V has about 300 m range. Posting my location to people within view range is really a massive "privacy concern".
We complain about patent trolls getting trivial patents for non-inventions by taking something totally normal and adding "with a computer" to it, but sometimes we do the same. Licence-plate reading cameras are a privacy concern because they can enter your location into a global database in near real-time. Telling people electronically what they could see with their own eyes? Hardly a privacy problem. If we were talking about a system to intercept these signals and update some global database, yes - but that is just the license-plate-reading-camera problem with a different technology. The problem in either case is not having a license plate or having V2V, but the people turning local information into global information.
And other than license plates, it's easy to solve it. Your car could automatically generate a new random ID for itself every time it stops for more than a minute, for example. Pseudonymity is quite cute when you understand it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
For your own safety, of course....
Will I be able to tell a driver that he is an asshole and needs to learn how to drive?
In the proposed protocol, the Evil bit is always set.
As a resident of said country (and a rider) I believe it's dangerous and will _only_ do it when traffic is stopped and only at low speed.
As someone else pointed out, the vast majority of riders who lane split in moving traffic are on crotch rockets - as are the vast majority of stupid riders(*). Relying on acceleration to get you out of trouble is fine until you run out of road, but it's better to anticipate and avoid trouble in the first place.
(*) I prefer to refer to them as organ donors.
WRT "pulling out" and other "driver didn't see motorcycle" stuff - speaking from a rider's point of view in most cases the rider bears a degree of culpability by loitering in a driver's blind spot, following too closely or failing to "read" driver intention.
There are old riders, bold riders, but not many old, bold riders.