Calling it “the next revolution in roadway safety,” the U.S. Department of Transportation hopes to standardize “vehicle communications” technology. Slashdot reader coondoggie writes:
The idea is to enable a multitude of new crash-avoidance applications that could save lives by preventing “hundreds of thousands of crashes every year by helping vehicles ‘talk’ to each other,” the DOT stated… [D]evices would use the dedicated short range communications to transmit data, such as location, direction and speed, to nearby vehicles. That data would be updated and broadcast up to 10 times per second to nearby vehicles, and using that information, V2V-equipped vehicles can identify risks and provide warnings to drivers to avoid imminent crashes.
Self-driving cars (and human drivers) could be informed when it’s safe to enter the passing lane (or when cars move into a vehicle’s blind spot), for example, and “often in situations in which the driver and on-board sensors alone cannot detect the threat.” Federal agencies estimate it will cost just $350 per vehicle by 2020 (and dropping over the decades to come), and they’ve also already issued guidelines about securing these systems from unauthorized access.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – U.S. Proposes Car-To-Car Data Sharing Standards