Nissan Leaf via Wikimedia Commons
In late September, buried in an announcement that its Leaf autonomous vehicle was given road-legal status in Japan, Nissan made a telling statement about the auto industry's interest in self-driving cars.
"The realization of the Autonomous Drive system is one of our greatest goals, because Zero Fatalities stands alongside Zero Emissions as major objective of Nissan's R&D," said Nissan R&D head Mitsuhiko Yamashita in a release that also noted the company is working "to achieve virtually zero fatalities in accidents involving its vehicles."
Random capitalization and marketing-speak aside, the message is clear: Nissan thinks that by removing drivers from its cars, it can eliminate traffic fatalities—a legitimate Good Thing, as well as a powerful marketing tool. For that to happen, cars will need to be able to drive themselves, which a wide variety of automakers are already working on. For that to work, the cars will need to be able to talk to each other.
Today, the US Department of Transportation and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that it will continue to develop vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications systems for personal automobiles. While it's just one waypoint on the long road towards autonomous vehicles, it's also a key step for getting smart-driving technologies on the roads sooner.
The safety promise of autonomous cars is rooted in the fact that humans have poor attention spans and are incredibly bad at predicting what the lunatic one lane over might do. If cars' computers could communicate with each other at high speed, potential crashes could be analyzed and responded to far faster than a human is capable of doing.
"Vehicle-to-vehicle technology represents the next generation of auto-safety improvements, building on the life-saving achievements we've already seen with safety belts and air bags," said US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx in the NHTSA's release. "By helping drivers avoid crashes, this technology will play a key role in improving the way people get where they need to go while ensuring that the US remains the leader in the global automotive industry."
Back in August 2012, the DOT's Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) deployed a fleet of 3,000 automobiles and buses connected by wi-fi to test how V2V and vehicle-to-infrastructure technology could work in practice. The fleet of human-driven vehicles, which cruised around Ann Arbor, Michigan, spent a year producing data on how smart systems can work, which the NHTSA and RITA are currently poring over. The renewed commitment from the DOT means such work will continue.
“This announcement represents a significant step forward in advancing the next generation of vehicle safety and automotive innovation, and is the result of years of collaboration between the transportation and high-tech industries and our federal, state and local partners,” said Scott Belcher, president and CEO of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, in its own statement.
For autonomous vehicles, which remain a few years off at the earliest, V2V communication is crucial. But as the DOT's announcement makes clear, automakers won't have to develop a working autonomous vehicle grid on their own, which would be an unfathomably tall task. Instead, regular old human-driven cars will likely get smarter and better able to communicate with themselves and their surroundings, driven by innovation at the government and manufacturer level. (Connected driving was a popular theme at this year's CES.) And as our cars get smarter and more self-aware, hopefully we humans will crash less.