If Only They Talked to Each Other

If vehicles could “talk” to each other, would driving be better and safer?

That question isn’t in the realm of sci-fi anymore. Turns out we (as in mankind) have already been collecting data on this topic. For the past 10 months, about 2,800 volunteers in Michigan have been driving vehicles fitted with this vehicles-to-vehicles communication technology. But until now, it’s been (mostly) just been transmitting data, not processing or acting upon it. The intent was to check how effective this data exchange is in the real world street.

But now we are ready to move to Step 2: the US Department of Transportation will be evaluating a demo to be organized this week by the University of Michigan. This demo will have the software process all that incoming data and then act on it, like issuing warnings to the driver and making choices. If it gets the green light (pun intended), the eventual plan is to extend this communication beyond just vehicles to include traffic lights and toll booths in the system.

So what would be the benefits of such an automated system? Reduced accidents for one. Lesser congestion; that in turn would reduce pollution. And of course, less stress for the drivers.

The step after that would be decide whether this technology, should it be found safe and reliable, be made mandatory for everyone or be optional (and left to the market to decide). Note this isn’t a trivial decision at all; because a mixed system can be problematic as Nick Carr describes:

“If you could snap your fingers and turn every car on the road into a computer-driven car, then you’d be able to go ahead and take down all those traffic lights and let the computers coordinate intersection traffic. The people formerly known as drivers would be free to focus their attention on what really matters in life, i.e., their smartphones. Instant nirvana. But that’s only possible in a Mussolini fantasy. The fact is, you’re going to have, for a good long time, both computer-driven cars and human-driven cars. That’s a mixed reality setup. The humans have their reality, and the computers have their reality, and the realities don’t mesh all that well. Remove the traffic lights, and, well, every intersection turns into an end-of-days battle between the forces of rationality and the forces of testosterone. It’s Larry Page vs. Rambo.”

(In case you didn’t know, Larry Page is the founder and CEO of Google, which by the way, already has its self-driven cars on the road!).

It will be interesting to see how the demo goes. And what decision they make. Will machines be our drivers sooner rather than later?