Car talk:
The science and politics behind vehicles that talk to each other and to the roadways
By Stephanie Levy
The basic rallying cry of the connected vehicle: “Here I am!” All images courtesy the U.S. Department of Transportation.
“Here I am!”
T
his small declarative statement could soon become a rallying cry for a new generation of vehicles that help their driver avoid crashes, save gas and redefine transportation as we know it. It’s a start to a new reality in which vehicles rely on connected and cooperative systems to communicate with the road and each other, making driving safer. It’s the idea that seems counterintuitive at first, but has the data to back it up: By taking human error out of operating vehicles, more human lives can be saved each year, along
with gasoline and wear and tear. It cuts CO2 emissions as well. For now, “Here I am!” is the first step in establishing and deploying vehicles with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to infrastructure (V2I) technologies. “It’s sending out information about where a vehicle is and where it’s heading,” says Mike Schagrin, program manager at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office. “It’s not about who the passengers are or who the vehicle is, but where it is, so other equipped vehicles can pick it up and know a vehicle is there.”
That’s the V2V part; V2I has the vehicle communicating with infrastructure at critical and often dangerous places — intersections. For instance, a traffic light could tell an approaching vehicle when it’s going to turn red. Depending on how much time it has, the vehicle could either decide to continue on or alert its driver that it’s time to start slowing down. The Department of Transportation calls all this “connected vehicle” research, where the vehicles can talk to each other and to the infrastructure on which they move. “For the vehicle-to-vehicle testing, we have a lot of research that’s geared towards Mission Critical
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Spring 2011
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