The United States government has decided to require automakers to implement safety-focused wireless communication technology into their future vehicles in an effort to increase the safety of American roads. The Department of Transportation hopes to create a standardized car-to-card system in which small to medium sized vehicles can automatically share data about their speed and direction with each other.
This data would then be relayed to the driver through alerts and pings that could potentially prevent around 600,000 crashes and 1,000 deaths on the road every year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published a report yesterday, saying, “Some crash-warning V2V applications, like Intersection Movement Assist (IMA) and Left Turn Assist (LTA), rely on V2V-based messages to obtain information to detect and then warn drivers of possible safety risks in situations where other technologies have less capability.”
According to the NHTSA’s estimates, the cost to develop a secure car-to-car communication system could be as high as $100 million, and the implementation would require automakers to equip the device with at least two dedicated short-range communicators. “It is NHTSA’s view that, if V2V were not mandated by the government, it would fail to develop or would develop slowly,” the administration wrote. “Because the value of V2V to one driver depends upon other drivers’ adoption of the technology, V2V falls into the class of goods that economists call network goods.”
Read more about the story at Automotive News.
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