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Audi's Traffic Light Information System Tells You When The Lights Are Going To Turn Green (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Audi's Traffic light information system offers a first: the ability to tell you when the stoplight is going to change from red to green. This is a big thing for the impatient driver, but it's an even bigger thing for the automotive industry. The new feature, announced Monday, will be available on 2017 Q7, A4, and A4 allroad models built from June, 2016 onward. As your car nears a traffic light, it will receive real-time data about the signals at that location. Because the data can be complex, Audi says the car's computer will decide whether it has enough information to know when the traffic light you're sitting at will turn green. If so, it'll display a countdown clock on the instrument cluster. Audi's General Manager of Connectivity, Pom Malhotra, said Audi tested the service on 100 cars for over a year. The company's working closely with the agencies that manage the 300,000 or so traffic lights in the United States, and data provider Traffic Technology Solutions (TTS) of Portland, Oregon. TTS processes a constant stream of traffic signal status in real time and sends it to Audi's own servers, which then send it to the car. Malhotra said, "A few things have been implemented that we think of as safeguards." For example, the countdown timer will disappear several seconds before the red light changes to green, forcing you to put down your phone or stop whatever you may be doing in the meantime and look at the light yourself. The feature will be available in the three models mentioned via Audi's Connect Prime infotainment package, which costs $199 for 6 months or $750 for 30 months.
just like the NHRA
How about the RT info telling the computer that the light is about to go red, and have it break automatically?
$400 an year for traffic data? better have top XM package
finally i don;t have to keep the foot down for more than necessary # of seconds
My built in slashdot post detector told me about this article going green.
I have a better idea. They can add a sensor to detect how full your bladder is, and figure out where the nearest restroom is once the level of discomfort reaches a threshold that the driver can select.
Now we'll get even more launch control pricks testing their cars in built up areas. Go VW. (Captcha: virgins - most likely many will be killed on pedestrian crossings as a result of this)
a brilliant idea - really
in todays society - where there are far too many stupid people who solely depend on a technology device to solve problems that the rest of us have actually learned the "Manual" way of doing things...
lets put a device in the cars for impatient drivers - so that over time they will depend on the device
now we are not going to say what will happen the first time said idiot driver guns it paying attention to the car - and NOT the actual light....
Hilarity ensues.
Lawsuits abound
IQ's continue to drop
I'll just watch for the cross-traffic light to turn yellow, thanks.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
and when it goes red you have about 3 seconds before yours turns green...
Not like anyone won't try to accelerate just that extra bit sooner... of course, I suppose they already do that currently... right, carry on.
So instead of trying to emit/pull data from the surroundings, it has to go up to the cloud for a database of stoplight info? WTF?!
Not only is it useless; it give Audi even more tracking data about you. Who the fuck through this was a good idea?
In Germany, you will be sitting at a red light, and the yellow will also come on. It is the warning that it is about to turn green. Very much like a christmas tree. You better start moving when the light goes green, or everyone else will run you over. I can see why they are adding this to their cars.
I look at the green light, and when it turns yellow I'm clutchin' in first gear. Also, we have countdown timers on the walk sign already. Thanks anyway.
... am pretty skeptic about this working properly or at all in some of the convoluted intersections around. Plus, what's wrong with using the old noodle to determine when my light's gonna turn green? What? So that I can be texting on my phone until the last second?
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
I agree $400 per year is quite high considering the alternative, i.e. pay attention. At least this keeps the Audi engineers doing something other than cheating on emissions.
Or they could just do what the UK does and use the yellow to indicate that the light is about to turn...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhD83ChXE5o
I'm willing to bet the existing lights could be programmed to do it with little expenditure.
to cover the cost of lawsuits when this thing starts causing accidents
More assholes who jackrabbit off a green light like they were Funny Car dragster driving.
its probably a backdoor to track your yellow light red light behavior for insurance and money generating police/county offices the rest is BS.
...on approach, and if there's enough time to accelerate ahead of the yellow light.
Perhaps in the next version.
or the ped timer count downs.
Sounds neat and could be useful.... but like so many advances...
Next up, car records state of all the lights and records what you are doing near every one of them (or uploads it to Audi or whatnot) and reports you to police or makes data available to police. Combine that with GPS data about where you went, how you were driving, where you were going/coming, how fast you were going, how many people were in the car, if you were touching the radio, etc, etc. Don't laugh... it is coming. And sooner than you think. And it is not tin-foil hat territory.
Live close to work, ride your bike, and same $$$. Your life will be healthier, while your bank account will be richer, and you will feel better. Maybe even enough better that you will become smug enough to post about it on the interwebs!
Exactly. Or, pay attention to the light as you are nearing it. I save a lot of gas by taking my foot off the gas and coasting towards the light when I can tell it will turn shortly. Not coming to a stop saves not only gas, but also saves your brakes. I am completely unsuccessful at getting my wife to use my strategy though. She actively speeds up towards red lights and slams on the brakes to stop. Annoying as all hell, especially since she goes through brake pads and rotors like they are going out of style. It just takes a bit of paying attention to very seldom have to actually completely stop at lights. (Turn lanes being the obvious exception - they won't turn green unless someone is stopped at them).
What is more important is verifying that no-one is running the red light when you enter the intersection.
Which in the US is an all too common occurrence.
And I really wish that some cities hadn't screwed people over by treating red light cameras as revenue sources rather than safety devices. The huge backlash against red light cameras because of shortened yellow light times has not helped road safety and probably made drivers untrusting about any future attempts to fix safety issues. Terrorism can't even come close to touching the number deaths per year cause by car crashes yet who gets all the funding?
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fuck you feds.
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Treason.
Dunno if it s a secret or anything but i just look at the walk sign on the orthagonal light. The only reason to have count down to green is to allow texting, gps correction or other activites that one should pull over for. Been there done that, car companies just need to install a front end that can withstand bumping dopes whoncant pay attention for 30 seconds.
Slashpot. The FBI's newest Honeypot.
Green means GO!
But Yellow means GO LIKE HELL!
We have all seen yellow light drivers blow through an intersection in front of us and our green light.
I met a nice young lady - a yellow light driver - right after she ran a barely-red light and t-boned my car.
I had a new green light, and I was too busy talking on the phone to notice her mistake.
Too many people are going to look up from their phones and just GO - this thing is going to kill people.
I guess this is for people with Taco Neck that can't turn their head 45 degrees to see the cross-traffic lights?
They'd make a lot more money if, instead of charging for the service as an optional package, they enabled it by default and charged you a monthly fee to turn it off.
I figured that this was only going to work when on a dynamometer. And they'd just have a defeat device to fake it for real-word driving.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This would be perfect in conjunction with other technology. Really, what's needed is for self-driving cars to incorporate this data at a higher level in navigation. Making decisions about which route to take based on which lights will be green at the "right" time can make those cross-town trips that *should* be 5 minutes but end up taking 10 minutes a thing of the past.
Traffic would flow best for everyone if navigation could incorporate these kinds of optimization routines.
And just wait see for it to mess up big time.
My first thought reading this was how easily the signal or reception could be affected in such a way as to screw people's timing. A subtle thing perhaps, but a good way of getting someone into a tragic accident once this tech spreads.
Just why?
The article I read about this mentioned that these 300,000 traffic lights are on the Internet and that's how Audi's going to receive the data. I'm hoping that the article had it wrong and these lights are just on some city intranet that Audi is going to gain access to. It would be very scary to have traffic lights online. How long would it take for someone to hack the traffic system and change all of the lights at random intervals. (Especially bad if those traffic lights happen to be hooked up to red light cameras that automatically issue fines.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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F B I
Auto makers are supposed to be improving safety. Studies have shown that accidents actually INCREASE at intersections where count down timers are used. https://science.slashdot.org/story/14/07/02/0341244/unintended-consequences-for-traffic-safety-feature
Geez. Talk about lowering the bar.
If you're so retarded that you need computers to perform basic tasks like steering, backing up, stopping and accelerating your vehicle then you shouldn't be behind the wheel in the first place and your driving privileges should be taken away. Good god what a bunch of pussies.
I think we'd have a winner with that one.
Which comes with the added bonus of actually paying attention to driving instead of fucking around with your phone until somebody honks (or your car beeps) to tell you that the light changed. Everybody else thanks you, too. At least everyone who isn't fucking around with their phone instead of driving.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
I'll just watch for the cross-traffic light to turn yellow, thanks.
Heh!
Rather than implementing a complex technology in every single car, there exist countries that have started to implement countdown traffic lights. I have found them while driving and understood it immediately without any explanation. Much simpler, really easy and intuitive, much cheaper globally. I do not understand the approach from Audi.
If this could be used for a larger system so that the car could go at a constant speed (even if lower than the speed limit) and catch all the lights green, I guess this might save a considerable amount of fuel and pollutants by avoiding the braking and acceleration. It will also feed into my OCD and make for a more pleasant (gratifying) trip - I hate waiting at red lights. Lights would need to be synchronized though. And I guess cars without such a system will still race from intersection to intersection, which might foul things up.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Another idea: when approaching a red light, the car could tell the driver what speed to drive at so that by the time they reach the light it has gone green? Avoid all that slowing down/stopping and then heavy acceleration, which cause traffic delays, emissions.
Come to think of it, I remember a town in Germany where the traffic lights also displayed a speed. If you kept to that speed, you would surf the "green wave", never being held up at lights.
Hit the gas, display countdown, then, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, ...... CRASH! at intersection as the bozo plays the new car game called "Beat the Light Clock!"
E Proelio Veritas.
I'll just watch
Sounds like if you're watching that this technology isn't targeted at you anyway.
There might be someone running the light, but fuck it, hit them. It's their fault and you need a new car.
What I want is a system that beeps loudly before a traffic light goes green so that idiots will drop their phone before I have to beep them.
Then again, this is for an Audi, so it will be used to ensure that they can drive right up my chuff from the moment the light goes green.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
In Shenzhen anyway. They have countdowns telling you when they are going to change.
Let the street racing begin to get going just a little bit before the light turns green. Wonderful.
So instead of watching the road in front of them, some drivers will be watching a clock on their dashboard and waiting for it to hit 0 then blindly flooring it. I mean, these people are probably the target market for this car. I can already think of a few people I already know that will probably instantly want one.
Twinstiq, game news
Yet another example of technology created by intelligent people helping dumb people get ahead in life. Anyone who is competent enough to watch the lights change knows when the light will turn from red to green already. Now this advantage is conferred to lesser people, while getting to be slightly ahead on the road is minor, this is a parable for the evils of modern technology.
Seriously, WTF is the point of this? To enable those assholes who jump the light to make a left turn before oncoming traffic? So people can race? Seriously... what is the.
"the countdown timer will disappear several seconds before the red light changes to green"
Better make that interval random, folks. Otherwise people will just learn to complete the countdown in their heads, then step on the gas without quite yet looking up.
Unfortunately, it enables Audi drivers to do other things besides paying attention to driving.
Wait, most Audi drivers are already doing that. Carry on.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Having just bought my new 2017 SQ5 to replace an Infiniti, I am reading this article with a bit of a chuckle. Now that I've had the car for a bit, I can say the new car is pretty, drives well and has decent horsepower, but I can say I am absolutely floored at how poor their electronics are overall. The car telling me about lights about to change isn't going to fix the fact the "Advanced Tech MMI Package" doesn't include Carplay or Android Auto, doesn't have straightforward ways to enter a GPS destination, makes song selection/advance difficult, even basic things like ending a damn phone call are difficult. Registering the car to Audi online failed, since they don't even offer the 2017 models to choose from, brilliant. I hope they have other engineers in charge of this feature, or it surely will be equally successful...
This is a bad idea. I hope I'm not the one hit by an Audi that timed it to hit the intersection just as the light changed to green at 45mph while I'm making a left turn, waiting on the other Audi coming towards me that tried to squeeze the lemon and failed. A much better idea would be to indicate, long before reaching the intersection, what speed will allow the car to reach it after it turns green instead of zooming up to it and sitting at the red. Still better would be traffic lights aware of how many cars approach from each direction and attempt to change to allow as many cars through from any direction per unit time as possible. Which would make Audi's "feature" useless, because the light would change each time according to immediate conditions and not be predictable enough to indicate imminent change to the driver.
While they're at it, the lights should only change in favor of cars using turn signals when planning to turn. Most Audi drivers would be stuck forever.
As used in Venezuela and some other latin american countries (don't know if somewhere else), there are semaphores with countdown timers, so you can see exactly in how much seconds the color will change.
They must be more expensive to operate, but they are really useful
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
This sounds like an integrated version of the Enlighten app (http://www.connectedsignals.com) - which uses a similar (if not the same - got tired running down branding names) data source. It doesn't provide the enhanced HMI or the automatic engine stop/start that the onboard systems can, but provides a very similar feature set.
Driving in Portland, I have found the "don't worry, the light will change before you get there" pretty darn useful.
If the light is green for more than 2 seconds, send a 100,000 volt shock to the seat. They're obviously STILL looking at the cell phone.
Used to love a Mercedes Diesel I owned. The horns were right in back of the grill. If I hit the horn, the people in front of me used to jump. It was fun for the whole family.
meanwhile cities all across the u.s. are replacing their traffic lamps with new focused lamps so only the person at the very front of the pack can tell what it is.