http://betaboston.com/news/2014/08/19/department-of-transportation-getting-ready-to-disrupt-the-way-you-drive/Department of Transportation getting ready to disrupt the way you drive
Michael Morisy Michael Morisy @morisy
A new publication by the Department of Transportation outlines how Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) technology can help cut down on accidents — and possibly pave the way for self-driving cars. The study indicates new regulations requiring the technology, which combines GPS with short-wave radio communications, could come as soon as 2020.
The report, which weighs in as a 327 page PDF (download link), outlines a variety of accidents the technology could help avoid, mostly regarding blind corners, and each V2V communications unit is expected to cost around $341 to $350 in 2020. The technology works by having GPS-enabled beacons on every vehicle and a variety of road-side objects, such as stop signs, stoplights, and barriers, which are constantly emitting data about their location, trajectory, and inertia, as well as other status information such as whether a car is braking or a light is about to turn red.
The report says the information is planned to be anonymized and only transmitted locally, with each vehicle having its own security certificate to prevent spoofing or false information. Interestingly, the only mention of self-driving cars in the report itself was the section on privacy:
In the June 5, 2013, poll released by the Alliance mentioned above, it was also found that consumers, when questioned about self-driving vehicles, expressed concerns about cyber- security (i.e., 81 percent about a computer hacker controlling the car), companies collecting data from the self-driving cars (i.e., 75 percent), and companies sharing this information with the government (i.e., 70 percent). It is important to note that consumers were responding about self-driving vehicles and not about V2V communication specifically,207 but their concerns about cyber-security and collection of data about their driving behavior are concerns that consumers could have regarding any sort of vehicle for which they believed could present such risks.
But while the report emphasizes benefits for human drivers (the agency estimates the technology could save 49 to 1,083 lives annually), it’s hard not to read into the system all the tools it enables for self-driving cars, which Google has been piloting in several cities out west.
Also hard: Not worrying about the privacy and security implications of such a system, particularly one that will be made mandatory in order to ensure its effectiveness (having only half of cars enabled with the system leaves a lot of blind spots).
Topic: Department of Transportation getting ready to disrupt the way you drive (Read 1189 times)
