On a frosty morning, imagine if the car 100 feet ahead of you could somehow alert you to black ice on an off-ramp. You'd slow down, and your car's electronic stability system could even take preliminary steps to anticipate the situation.
Car-to-car communication, the next step in safety technology. The Center for Automotive Research have discusses this for years. There is even a federal program called Intelligent Transportation Systems. According to VP of engineering Tom Baloga, BMW's progress toward car-to-car communication is moving forward very well. U.S. automakers have agreed upon a standardized frequency 5.9 GHz regardless of the car. 5.9 GHz is the same frequency European cars use. The car is going to act like a data-collection probe. The car's location will be transmitted to other cars and to an infrastructure. This data will be used to identify traffic flow, slippery conditions, and bottlenecks.
Maintenance crews could find pothole-ridden areas based on suspension kinematics data, while salt crews could deduce which streets were especially icy using data from antilock braking or electronic stability systems.
Naturally, there's another side to this: How much do you want on the public record about your car and, by extension, your driving habits?
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