Feds May Require Cars to Talk to Each Other to Avoid Crashes
January 2nd, 2014Via: ABC:
Federal officials will decided in the “coming weeks” whether to require new cars to include smart technology that would alert drivers of a coming crash, even in vehicles that are two or three cars away.
The vehicle-to-vehicle — or V2V — technology has undergone testing in recent years and has already been installed in some cars that are on the road.
A recent study by the Government Accountability Office determined that if the gizmos were widely deployed, “V2V technologies could provide warnings to drivers in as much as 76 percent of potential multi-vehicle collisions.”
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“Widespread technology depends on other cars having the same system so they can talk to each other,” said David Wise, director of the GAO’s Physical Infrastructure Team, who wrote the GAO study.
But it also requires that the system be secure.
“Privacy is the real challenge,” Wise said. He said the V2V will likely rely on GPS-type data that could track a person’s movements.
“Who has access and how do you secure the data?” Wise asked rhetorically. He also raised the specter of someone hacking the system and causing havoc on the road.
