Ambulances In Sweden Will Be Able To Hijack Car Radios During Emergencies (digitaltrends.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: The Swedish government wants to make it impossible to be caught off guard by a speeding ambulance. Sure, their sirens are loud -- but soon they'll be able to take over your car's radio. Swedish students at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm have developed a way for emergency vehicles to transit radio signals to warn other vehicles of an approaching truck. It's called the EVAM System, according to Phys.org, and it's designed to send a signal over a specific FM radio band that'll interrupt music or radio and display a test message over the system's tuner display -- so long as the car is equipped with a Radio Data System (RDS). The number of crashes caused by muted sirens is on the rise, Florian Curinga, one of the students working on the project, said. That's because of improved sound insulation in cars. Emergency vehicles in Stockholm will begin testing the system this year. The EVAM System can also predict how far in advance the message needs to be broadcast, depending on traffic speed, according to Phys.org. It may also be helpful in warning drivers about upcoming accidents, the students added. EVAM will work on two-thirds of all vehicles on the road, Curinga said. All drivers need to do is have their radio systems turned on. If a message is broadcast then, they'll see it -- and hear it -- from the tuner.

Comments

Re:This is stupid

[uffe_nordholm]

It is not as stupid as you might think. Essentially all radios sold for use in cars today come with the RDS system as part of them, although it can be turned off. What this system does is give you some info: the channel you are listening to and so on. It also gives the radio the current time. But most importantly it also allows for interrupting _any_ sound source (radio, CD, DVD, USB....) to force your radio to play the voice message sent through the RDS system (I think it's broadcast on certain FM transmitters, so tuning in to them is no problem).

These messages are usually only about the situation on the roads: places where there have been accidents that impact the flow of traffic on large roads and so on. And once the message is over, your radio reverts to whatever it was doing before the interruption. I find these messages very useful, even if most of them are not about the roads I am on: the one time I was on a road affected, I was able (thanks to being told well before I got to it) to take a detour around the site of an accident, and save myself an hour or two of sitting in a traffic jam.

This RDS system can be turned off if you want to, in which case your radio will not play any of the traffic messages broadcast.

Full disclosure: I live in Sweden. I also happen to love the RDS messaging system, even if I am rarely need the information provided.

Re:This is stupid

[AaronW]

You mean this one?