An article on LiveScience.com says that crash-free cars are doable with today's technology. Technology would allow cars to make calculation that determine when a collision was about to take place. The technololgy is called vehicle-to-vehicle communication, or V2V.
"The technology is doable right now," says Carsten Bergmann, a VW lab manager. (Of course, getting the right data to the right car at the right time calls for fiendishly complicated threat-detection algorithms that are far easier with four cars than with hundreds of them.)
General Motors has gone one better than VW with a demonstration DSRC-equipped Cadillac CTS that stops itself to avoid accidents. Its enhanced stability-control system predicts where it's headed—like, into the rear end of another DSRC car stopped in the middle of the road—and prompts the onboard computer to apply the brakes without any input from the driver. The effect is very cool. It's also a little spooky, and many doubt that live-free-or-die Americans will ever sign off on fully autonomous vehicles.
Luckily, engineer Tomiji Sugimoto and his team at Honda R&D are working on a human-machine interface that will keep drivers in the loop. Head-up displays are a no-brainer. But Honda is also developing what's called haptic feedback, such as shaking steering wheels and pedals that vibrate.
"We're talking about a system that acts like a backseat driver," Sugimoto says. Except it's a backseat driver that's always right.
To make the concept work in heavy traffic would require GPS devices in all vehicles, a a matrix of of traffic data and complex threat-detection algorithms. Like the article suggests cars that stop themselves to avoid accidents may spook some drivers so it may be awhile before anything like this is in place.
