Breaking down the live saving opportunities of V2V
There’s a lot of talk these days about autonomous driving. And, likely within the next 10 to 15 years, we will be able to have our cars take us to many locations without our having to touch the steering wheel. But, I honestly don’t think that’s likely for quite a long time mostly due to regulation, testing and making sure our cars can avoid others that are causing accidents.
It’s the latter issue – avoiding accidents – that is the subject of this column. I think there is a lot that can be done to prevent many of the accidents that take over 32,000 lives on the roads each year. And, we can make real progress on reducing the number of people who die in auto crashes each year if we can just establish a way for vehicles (both cars and trucks) to communicate with each other.
On Jan. 14, President Barak Obama announced a $4 billion initiative to accelerate the acceptance of driverless cars, curb traffic fatalities, reduce congestion and delays. Part of the initiative is to create national standards so driverless cars will meet the same minimum regulations in all states such as California, Texas, New York or Florida.
A smaller – but I would argue more important – part of the proposed legislation is to set up pilot programs and define standards for connected vehicles that will enable vehicles to talk to one another. If all vehicles on the road can be required to have a minimum capability to communicate, then any identification of a problem can be communicated to all other nearby vehicles which, in turn, can take action to avoid becoming part of the problem.
You’re likely thinking: “how in the world can you require all vehicles to have a compatible vehicle-to-vehicle communication system?” To be sure, the challenge is difficult to get all current cars on the road to “retrofit” a wireless system that not only can receive communications from other vehicles, but also communicate to other vehicles. And, here’s the tricky part, take automated action such as steer the car into a different lane or simply slow down to a stop.
The most common problem is when cars up in front of a line of vehicles have to stop quickly, most typically in a foggy road condition or when someone slams on their brakes. You often read about a multicar pileup on the Interstate when two cars collide in a fog bank. Then, car after car – not knowing that there is an accident right in front of them – continue into the fog bank and the entire situation gets worse.
Now, imagine if the V2V system is in place. The two initial cars send out notices that they are in trouble. With a little luck, they avoid hitting each other. But, more importantly, notices are sent out that there is a problem in the fog bank. The other vehicles behind the two in the fog bank, receive the message and automatically the brakes are applied to ensure that no additional vehicles become part of a multicar accident. This is shown graphically in figure 1.
Almost every car today has wireless communications in the form of a smartphone owned by the driver and/or the passengers. A notification system could be put into place much like the way the Amber Alert system works today that would notify the smartphones behind the pending accident. The drivers and/or passengers in the vehicles might all receive the alert, but they might not have enough time to avoid being in the pileup. Some drivers might take action while others might not. Thus, an important part of any V2V system is to include a way to at least slow down the vehicle. Of course, this might take two phases to achieve: phase one to issue the notifications to the smartphones behind the problem and phase two to automatically intervene the control of the car or truck.
Currently, there is work going on by the National Highway Safety Administration to provide dedicated short-range communications technology for both V2V and vehicle-to-infrastructure. DSRC would use the 5.9 gigahertz band as the communication radio frequency and would provide very low latency to allow for quick reaction and control of vehicles. An April 2015 report by the Transportation Research Board provides an update of almost 10 years of research. It is not clear if this technology will be adopted anytime soon because there is still evaluation going on by a number of governmental agencies on defining the standard, and then the politics of getting it adopted and then deployed.
With a number of current wireless technologies (cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) and a new one proposed by the NHSA (DSRC), it would seem the biggest problem is going to be getting adoption on the vast majority of the installed base of well over 250 million cars and trucks. It is likely that if the installation of the necessary wireless is required by (federal) law and the public as well as the manufacturers get behind it, we should be able to have the right wireless technologies on board each vehicle within five years of it becoming a requirement – about the same time it took to get seat belts installed after it became law.
The main rationale for supporting DSRC at 5.9 GHz is very low latency from initiation of a notice of a problem to being able to react to it quickly. The first phase of deployment is notification by all vehicles to the rear or nearby of a problem (“Alert!”). The second phase is the ability for the notice to trigger an action to the vehicle (“Stop as soon as possible in concert with nearby vehicles.”).
Phase two requires mechanical intervention that is a lot more difficult than simply displaying an alarm. But, if we are talking about being able to make cars drive themselves (first just on highways via “super cruise control” and then everywhere), it seems like it wouldn’t be anywhere near that difficult to enable a small group of vehicle mechanical behaviors such as stopping to be added to all new vehicles and via an accessory add-on to the installed base of vehicles.
I’m willing to bet that within 10 years (mid-2020s) we’ll have V2V working and the ability for cars to avoid many of the situations that cause most accidents, e.g. piling into an accident ahead of your car, someone running a red light and swerving on a highway.
Just think, with some rather straightforward wireless technology, we’ll be able to save tens of thousands of lives that today are lost because we don’t have any way to prevent them. Shame on all of us for not getting V2V and actionable behavior like automatically slowing down and stopping the car approved and in place. I’m confident that someday we’ll all find V2V to be so beneficial that we will assume it is working in all vehicles and be shocked if a car or truck doesn’t have it.
J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D. is the principal analyst with Mobilocity LLC and a research affiliate with Frost & Sullivan. He is a nationally recognized industry authority who focuses on monitoring and analyzing emerging trends, technologies, and market behavior in mobile computing and wireless data communications devices, software and services. Dr. Purdy is an “edge of network” analyst looking at devices, applications and services as well as wireless connectivity to those devices. Dr. Purdy provides critical insights regarding mobile and wireless devices, wireless data communications, and connection to the infrastructure that powers the data in the wireless handheld. Dr. Purdy continues to be affiliated with the venture capital industry as well. He spent five years as a venture advisor for Diamondhead Ventures in Menlo Park where he identified, attracted and recommended investments in emerging companies in the mobile and wireless industry. He has had a prior affiliation with East Peak Advisors and, subsequently, following their acquisition, with FBR Capital Markets. Dr. Purdy advises young companies who are preparing to raise venture capital. Dr. Purdy has been a member of the Program Advisory Board of the Consumer Electronics Association that produces CES, one of the largest trade shows in the world. He is a frequent moderator at CTIA conferences and GSM Mobile World Congress. Prior to funding Mobilocity, Dr. Purdy was chief mobility analyst with Compass Intelligence. Prior to that, he owned MobileTrax, LLC and enjoyed successful stints at Frost & Sullivan, Dataquest (a division of Gartner) among other companies.
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