BMW Studies Car-to-Car Communication

On a frosty morning, imagine if the car 100 feet ahead of you could somehow alert you to black ice on an off-ramp. You’d slow down, and your car’s electronic stability system could even take preliminary steps to anticipate the situation. Witness car-to-car communication, the next step in safety technology. It’s something experts in organizations from the Center for Automotive Research to economic consultancy Global Insight have mulled for years now, and there’s even a federal program, called Intelligent Transportation Systems, to coordinate such efforts.

BMW, for one, says it’s on board. At yesterday’s Washington, D.C., auto show, VP of engineering Tom Baloga said the company’s progress toward car-to-car communication is “moving forward very well.” That’s in part because U.S. automakers have agreed upon a standardized frequency — 5.9 GHz — regardless of the car. Incidentally, 5.9 GHz is the same frequency European cars use.

“The car is going to act like a data-collection probe,” Baloga said. “The car’s location — anonymously, of course — will be transmitted to other cars and to an infrastructure, and this data will be used to identify traffic flow, slippery conditions, bottlenecks” and more.

The possibilities are manifold. Maintenance crews could find pothole-ridden areas based on suspension kinematics data, while salt crews could deduce which streets were especially icy using data from antilock braking or electronic stability systems, Baloga said.

Naturally, there’s another side to this: How much do you want on the public record about your car — and, by extension, your driving habits? It’s a legitimate concern, Baloga said, and the chief reason why the vast majority of data would remain anonymous.

“We in the auto industry are extremely hesitant to allow for our systems to be used for enforcement,” he said.

Extenuating circumstances — kidnappings or drunken drivers, for example — may create situations where society benefits more by crossing those boundaries, Baloga said. But by and large, “automakers are not focused on controlling that.”

It’s food for thought, at the very least. What do you think? Does the safety benefit potential in car-to-car communication outweigh privacy concerns?

[blogs.cars.com]