I have a really cool idea that’s got so much potential: We totally need to begin making cars that can wirelessly communicate with each other. It’d be like a modern version of CB radio!
This idea has a lot of pretty interesting correlaries. Imagine the idea of Web 2.0 information sharing being carried over to the highway! It’d improve traffic safety, make road trips take less time, and reduce highway congestion. It would also create a very accurate database of information about traffic patterns, which could be made public domain so that highway departments would have a far easier time improving traffic flow.
Here I’ve listed some of the ways car communication could make driving cleaner, safer, and more enjoyable for everyone:
- You’d have to set up a P2P type of network (a flat hierarchy– every node in the network would be on the same level as every other) for the cars to communicate with each other. Potentially, in cities, at homes, and at interstate rest stops, you could also have cars communicate with wireless computer networks in the area, so that the information could stream online. People could log on to a web site and find the road conditions for Route 66 with a few mouse clicks.
- Cars could monitor surrounding traffic patterns by measuring things like average speed per car and car density per mile of highway and broadcast the information to passing cars via a wireless router under the hood, or combined with the radio antenna. Imagine going down a highway and recieving up-to-the-minute traffic updates from cars passing in the other direction!
- Sensors on the bottom of your car could pick up information about the condition of the road itself. Likewise, weather could be monitored by sensors on the roof or along the edges of your car.
- Since police scanners are illegal most places, this kind of technology would probably be pretty severely regulated. Once the government started realizing that the benefits of this kind of communication far outweigh the drawbacks, they’d probably hop on the P2P-bandwagon too and possibly include roadside fixtures to extend the network (and make it easier for them to synthesize car data as well).
I’ll probably talk about this wild and crazy idea some more in the near future. If you have any points to add, I’d be happy to hear your comments. Maybe making this idea possible is one of the first projects I’ll undertake after I graduate from college!
the idea has already been posed. they took it one step farther: the cars had autopilot, and through relays would act as sort of a supercomputer, so traffic would just flow smoothly and if there was a traffic jam it would reroute you.
I really can’t wait until this happens!
Automated driving seems like, initially, it would be unsafe… but as the technology advanced I’m sure it would become safer and more reliable than human driving. Less error. And imagine the benefits this would have in the field of artificial intelligence?
You should look in to APRS, or the Automatic Position Reporting System. It’s a very large, international wireless radio network created by amateur radio operators, where vehicles (and sometimes people and houses) transmit their coordinates, along with other interesting information–who they are, the weather at their house, etc. You can look up any amateur radio operator online through an app that uses the Google Maps API and see where they are, their heading, and other information, and if you have a computer and the appropriate radio and license you can query the network for location reports without having to have internet connectivity. On top of all of that, locating of nodes on the APRS network can occur even if the person you are trying to locate does not have GPS on board, as others nearby with APRS rigs will automatically participate in helping locate the individual through triangulation.