Poke My Ride: Our Future Cars Will Talk To Traffic Lights, Each Other
At SXSW Interactive, I listened to Peter Stone talk about a future of autonomous cars that would be able to navigate through traffic and fly through stop lights with little more than the push of a button. You’d just need to climb into the backseat, press “opaque” on your liquid crystal smart glass, turn on your hologoggles, hang on tight, and let the computer take care of the rest. A robot car sounds more efficient (and more comforting) than, say the solution that some European cities have landed on: removing traffic lights altogether.
But the next step towards our near future of smart cars lies in building up a mobile “smart grid” of car networks. If cars could talk to traffic lights – and to each other – traffic and emissions could be more intelligently managed, meaning safer, faster and less polluting rides. Idling at red lights isn’t just annoying, especially when there’s no cross traffic: it’s largely why fuel economy is 25 percent worse in the city than on the highway.
Every major car company (and computer companies like IBM) is working on networked transportation. Treehugger reports on one recent project:
BMW and Siemens unveiled a system of networked traffic lights that can communicate with nearby cars to warn them about road conditions, help them better use anti-idling features, but that can also learn about traffic patterns from those cars and adjust cycling times to optimize traffic flow, saving time and fuel.
Such a system could also be expended to have cars talk directly to each other (“Car2Car” instead of “Car2Infrastructure”). This could mean that a car slipping on black ice could warn cars behind it about the traction conditions so they could know to slow down and be careful.
There’s always the risk that having more data streaming into a driver’s face via augmented reality windshields could be distracting, and that smart cars could make drivers more complacent. It’s also still unclear how smart traffic systems will incorporate “non-intelligent” transportation, like bicycles or feet.
But if cars can communicate with each other, we’d be able to use them better, more cleanly, and perhaps less than we do now. And by networking cars, we’d be letting drivers and passengers passing each other on the highway or driving to the same destination, communicate with each other too. That could make it possible for cars to start trading not just road data but tips on nearby restaurants, driving mix tapes, and even riders. (Inevitably, the possibilities for inter-car dating will proliferate.)
Of course, cars can be a pretty dumb mode of urban transportation. But they’re not likely to go away anytime soon. If we can network them together, we’ll be making them a little bit smarter, and further proving that social networking isn’t just for sharing what kind of burrito you had for lunch.
See a graphic on networked transportation at the Washington Post.
Reblogged from Motherboard.
