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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.
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.
This will simply open up new attack surfaces on unsuspecting vehicles.
Instead they will configure the V2V so that cops can simply read your speedometer as you pass. No need for radar and no way to argue it in court.
followed shortly by cops(and hackers) having the ability to shut down any car it chooses? no thanks
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
> 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.
That would be good, but just make sure you remember to stop weaving in and out of traffic with no blinker, or drive between cars in their lanes because they are going to slow for you.
I know this sounds like a knock at bike riders but its not, i ride myself, but far to many bikers (more often than not on crotch rockets) tend to ignore traffic laws just as much
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
They will, or you assume they will? There's a difference...
Besides, who cares how your speeding is detected? If you're speeding you're speeding. There's no "it's ok as long as I don't get caught"-clause.
Instead they will configure the V2V so that cops can simply read your speedometer as you pass. No need for radar and no way to argue it in court.
...and they will have a field in the protocol that will MASK the display of cops, so they can hide, even when they want you to NOT be able to hide...
Hacking the Protocol in 3... 2... 1...
I can't text and drive but my car can....
This conclusion you have is because you're paranoid.
Modern cars already have wireless communication attached to their security systems. Government mandated backdoors wouldn't require a wide-ranging communications network to work.
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...
And no government official would every request a kill switch option.
Coming to a cell phone near you next year and in your car just a few years from now. lol
According to this, it is already a "feature" of OnStar, just like the LEO ability to SILENTLY turn on the cabin microphone, which was (supposedly) outlawed by a Court decision, NOT because of privacy concerns, of course, (afterall, why should there be an "expectation of privacy" when having a conversation in your car with the windows up and the doors locked?), but because the designers of OnStar were so stupid they couldn't make the system do a manual override by the occupants in an emergency...
This conclusion you have is because you're paranoid.
Modern cars already have wireless communication attached to their security systems. Government mandated backdoors wouldn't require a wide-ranging communications network to work.
Actually you probably mean backdoors wouldn't require a *new* wide-ranging communications network to work... The OnStar system (and others like it) already have their own nationwide communication system (the cellular phone network) to allow law enforcement access to vehicle data, AND the ability to disable the vehicle remotely. And you know what? It's because people *want* that feature:
"Stolen Vehicle Slowdown is a prime example of a safety service that our customers rely on us to provide,” said George Baker, emergency services outreach manager, OnStar. “We have a strong relationship with law enforcement that has allowed us to refine our processes, promote teamwork and more quickly recover stolen vehicles for our subscribers.”
If we could snap our fingers, and migrate every car in America to a driverless system with no driver interaction, we'd save thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Want the enjoyment of driving? Go to a track. Public roads are for transportation from A to B.
What's wrong with hitting the brakes in an unexpected emergency to assess the actual danger, exactly? If the person behind collides with them, they were following too closely for the speed the person behind was going in the first place. That's not the fault of the person who slowed down or stopped their car.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"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.
But presently, it becomes a secret again after the impact (a secret that can only be coaxed out of the skidmarks and dents) that apparently 33,000 people a year are worth dying to keep... There are many concerns with this (like how to keep it secure and reliable) but privacy, as you note, is pretty close to the bottom since your car location is most certainly other people's business as soon as you take it on a public road.
Of course... and pilots should never trust their electronic guidance to get them where they need to go... they should only ever use visual confirmation near the ground and dead reckoning while at altitude.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Democracy demands that at least 50% plus one agree with you.
This is going to make vehicles even more expensive. It's not clear how effective these systems will be. It's not clear how exploitable these systems will be. I don't want the authorities to have a simple way of ordering vehicles to do things that the driver does not agree to. I don't trust software to take control away from the driver. Then you're still going to have older vehicles (which will suddenly be worth a lot more money), bicycles, motorcycles, equestrians, etc that won't be participating in this V2V conversation.
Then, is this going to encourage drivers to be even more inattentive? I already cringe at the commercials that show drivers futzing with things in the back seat or picking stuff off the floor and the collision avoidance saves them. Great, but that doesn't mean you're now free to be inattentive! If anything, cars should be less safe and speed limits higher to force people to pay attention, or else.
California is the only state in the country where lane-splitting is legal.
"Basically, what we're most interested in is the speeds," Pope said. "You should lane-split no faster than 10 mph over the speed of traffic around you, and we recommend (motorcyclists) not split at all if the traffic is faster than 30 mph."
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
You've got this 100% backwards. Deciding to drive slower than everyone else makes you a much bigger risk than the people driving the same speed. If the speed at which most drivers are comfortable on a road is too high for safety the road system itself (which includes signage and surroundings) has been designed incorrectly and should be corrected.
because that amounts to surveillance. The closest thing to current system would be a detector placed at certain locations and would only ticket vehicles within 50meter radius. This would be similar to traffic cameras.
...Or those mysterious PAIRS of buried "loop detectors" (complete with a SHIELD buried between them, so that the "triggers" produced are crisply-timed), that have appeared (complete with the $50k (guessing) controller-boxes hiding in the bushes off the side of the road). What do you think a PAIR of loop detectors (positioned so you drive over one, then the other, in quick succession) in the SAME LANE is for?
I'll give you a hint: They are ALWAYS positioned within eyesight of the tall "lighting" towers (you know, the ones with the pan/tilt/zoom cameras in them, that the gummint called people crazy and paranoid for saying they (the hidden cameras) were there, until they started broadcasting the signals from them on the TV news every day).
Check it out. I am an embedded developer who has some experience working with vehicle loop detectors, and I can recognize a SPEED DETECTOR when I see one (that's why there are two detectors, to develop an "interval" between the signals, and the shield is to make the "detection time" more reliable (loop detectors were originally not designed to be so precise)).
They started appearing about 5 years ago on the interstate system in the state in which I live, and I have seen them in other states of the U.S.A., too. But no one EVER talks about them...
Airbags, when first mandated by government ahead of when manufacturers were prepared for roll-out, were in fact quite dangerous. Does your car have an airbag off switch for the front passenger seat, so a child can sit there? It took a while for people to catch on and socially impose a "no kids in the front seat" rule, after many unfortunate incidents involving children. It was an total fuck-up, a perfect example of government do-gooding directly injuring people - children and the elderly in this case. And it was years before the problem was properly addressed with weight-sensors in the seats.
There's a strong market for safety features in cars today. You really don't need ham-handed government applying force for adoption.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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!
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
You've got this 100% backwards. Deciding to drive slower than everyone else makes you a much bigger risk than the people driving the same speed. If the speed at which most drivers are comfortable on a road is too high for safety the road system itself (which includes signage and surroundings) has been designed incorrectly and should be corrected.
Correct -- the problem occurs when that person at the front of the line suddenly drives slower, due to hitting something, not being able to react in time, seeing the traffic light at the last minute, etc.
There are a few things that affect how fast people SHOULD drive -- intersection timings (get rid of intersections, they're unsafe, and there are better soltuions), road engineering, weather, driver alertness/reflexes, chances of some obstruction such as a child suddenly veering onto the road, and people doing stupid things.
Unfortunately, you can't fix the last one.
What gets me is NOT people driving over the limit, but people rushing to the next intersection when it's obvious they'll stop at the same light I will, people inside my 2 second react-time zone (that means if you're going faster than the limit, you should be giving other cars MORE room, not less), and people who just don't understand the laws of physics.
When you speed up a car, damage on impact is exponential, not linear. Also, cars react differently on different surfaces when braking, and people's reaction times have a limit. Many cities are lazy with their speed limits, and you can often find roads that, barring stupid drivers, are safe to drive at significantly higher speeds.
But again, you can't fix stupid, so the limits get normalized. It doesn't matter how good a driver you are, the limits are there to protect you from the intersection of your reaction speed and vehicle's mass+coefficient of friction, and the other person who did something idiotic that you didn't expect.
There are often reasons road speeds are set low that are way beyond how safe the road surface is for traffic to drive on at higher speeds, and those other reasons often can't be corrected, whereas a speed limit can be easily adjusted.
No Tinfoil here.
1. As I said, the Loop Pairs are ALWAYS within direct sight of the light/camera towers, and in relatively close proximity; I'd guess within 1,000 feet, never much more. Certainly within decent "zoom" range.
2. "traffic studies" (remember Bridgegate?) are always short-lived, usually only a week or so, and are (still) characterized by those pneumatic hoses stretched across ALL lanes. And today, they simply do traffic-flow analysis either from the air, or by using those solar-powered ultrasonic or RADAR units that are prominently displayed next to the edge of the highway (the ones that always seem to have a solar panel on them).
I don't trust software to take control away from the driver.
While I completely agree, subjectively, I also understand enough psychology and statistics to know that a) the feeling of control is mostly emotional, not rational. It's why your mother in the passenger seat is scared in situations where you as the driver are completely cool - you are in control, she is not. That she's more easily agitated only makes it more visible. It's a well-documented fact that experiencing the same situation once in control, or even just seemingly in control, and once not in control is experienced very differently.
Statistics, on the other hand, show that even at this early stage, autonomous vehicles have a better-than-average track record. So while you may feel less safe, the numbers say that you are actually more safe.
etc that won't be participating in this V2V conversation.
Which is why autonomous or semi-autonomous (assisted driving) vehicles do not rely on one input source alone. V2V is not intended to replace all the sensors and stuff, it's one more input source.
Great, but that doesn't mean you're now free to be inattentive! If anything, cars should be less safe and speed limits higher to force people to pay attention, or else.
Humans are really, really bad at paying attention to monotonous tasks for extended periods of time. The sooner our cars drive themselves completely, the better.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org