Feds Unveil Rule Requiring Cars To 'Talk' To Each Other (thehill.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The Obama administration released a long-awaited rule on Tuesday requiring all new vehicles to have communication technology that allows them to "talk" to each another, which officials say could prevent tens of thousands of crashes each year. The proposal calls for all new light-duty cars and trucks to eventually be equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology, a safety system that enables cars to send wireless signals to each other, anticipate each other's moves and thus avoid crashes. The rule would require 100 percent of new vehicle fleets to have V2V technology within four years of the final rule's enactment. The proposal will be open for public comment for 90 days. The connected vehicle rule builds on previous work by the outgoing administration to accelerate the deployment of innovative safety technology. The Department of Transportation released the first-ever federal guidelines for driverless cars in September. "We are carrying the ball as far as we can to realize the potential of transportation technology to save lives," said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. "This long-promised V2V rule is the next step in that progression. Once deployed, V2V will provide 360-degree situational awareness on the road and will help us enhance vehicle safety." Officials say V2V has the potential to mitigate 80 percent of non-impaired crashes and can interact with other crash avoidance systems, like automatic braking. V2V uses dedicated short-range radio communications to exchange messages about a car's speed, direction and location. The system uses that information from other vehicles to identify potentials risks and warn its driver. A pair of Democratic senators called on the agency to ensure that vehicles have "robust" cybersecurity and privacy protections in place before automakers deploy V2V.

Comments

Alterterior Motives...

[pellik]

Let's attach a unique ID transmitter to every car in America!

Re:Alterterior Motives...

[vtcodger]

It IS a good thing. Not the unique ID part which is a bit scary. But cars communicating their intentions to each other. It should make roads considerably safer. HOWEVER, I suspect that implementing it is not as easy as it sounds.

It's the corner of 1st and Main in most any big US city. Or its foreign equivalent. And there are maybe 200 cars, buses, trucks, carts, mopeds, bicycles, horsecarts, etc, etc,etc in the area. And they are all squawking endlessly something like "Hi, I'm a mostly blue 2031 VW Hedgehog at latitude xx.xxxx,longitude yyy.yyyy proceeding NorthEast toward an intersection where I plan to turn left. If you need to talk to me, my friends call me $%34XQC1" And the vehicles are all using the same RF frequency band. And there are three other blue 2031 Hedgehogs in the area. And two 2032s which are visually identical except for the shape of the passenger side mirror. And, thanks to multipath GPS reception, most of the vehicles are a bit uncertain about the last three digits of their coordinates. And half those who aren't uncertain should be. And maybe it's raining. Or snowing. And there's an ambulance or fire engine that's trying to get vehicles out of its way.

Just exactly how does this nifty vehicle communication scheme sort all that out?

I'm not saying this is going to be abused, but...

[barc0001]

This is going to be abused. People will have so much fun with this, it'll be unreal. Imagine a little box you can buy/build that spoofs a vehicle system and tricks all the cars in a 100 meter radius into executing an emergency stop...