Communications of the ACM

commercial vehicles.

The majority of vehicles in the pi-
lot deployment were equipped with a
broadcast-only “vehicle awareness de-
vice,” according to Debby Bezzina, UM-
TRI’s senior program manager. “These
are what we call ‘target vehicles;’ in
a nutshell, they transmit position,
speed, and heading. So they’re saying,
‘Here I am! Here I am! Here I am!’ 10
times a second.”
Approximately 400 vehicles were
equipped with devices that could
read these signals and react to them
with an audible tone. Automakers
including Ford, General Motors,
Honda, Hyundai-Kia, Mercedes-
Benz, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswa-
gen supplied 64 integrated vehicles
that reacted with audible, visible,
and tactile warnings. (None of these
cars had “self-driving” capabili-
ties—they merely alerted the driv-
er.) The two-year study resulted in
approximately 47 terabytes of data
from 27 million miles on the road;
this collection of information was
analyzed by an evaluator within the
U.S. DOT, and informed the U.S.
DOT’s August report.

Bezzina saw a flurry of industry ac-
tivity after that report’s release, as well
at the announcement by General Mo-
tors CEO Mary Barra that the company
would be offering advanced intelli-
gent and connected technology on
certain 2017 models. Yet Bezzina be-
lieves it will take years for sensors, V2I,
and V2V to all come together to make
“automated and connected” vehicles
that look a lot like Google’s vision of a
“driverless” car. Even when such cars
hit the road, she expects to see differ-
ences between the two visions.

“With the Google vehicle, everything is standalone; you’re not talking to other vehicles, you’re not talking to the infrastructure,” she says. “But I think a fully automated vehicle is also connected—first with sensors and GPS, and then V2I communication, and then V2V communication with the other vehicles in my lane. I think that, in my lifetime, there will be a special lane on the freeway that you can only get in it if you’re in such a car. And then you can take your hands off the wheel and read the newspaper.”

Further Reading

Harding, J., Powell, G.R., Yoon, R., Fikentscher, J., Doyle, C., Sade, D., Lukuc, M., Simons, J., and Wang, J.

(2014, August). Vehicle-to-vehicle communications: Readiness of V2V technology for application. (Report No. DOT HS 812 014). Washington, DC: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration http://1.usa.gov/1wYQ8TY CAR 2 CAR Communication Consortium (European) https://www.car-2-car.org Intelligent Transportation Society of America http://www.itsa.org Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration http://www.safercar.gov/v2v/ University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute http://www.umtri.umich.edu Safety Pilot Model Deployment program http://www.its.dot.gov/safety_pilot/spmd.htm Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center http://www.toyota.com/csrc/ Tom Geller is an Oberlin, OH-based technology and business writer.

technologies could work together. “I think they’re very complementary. We already have sophisticated radar and camera systems so we can see the car ahead of us. However, with V2V we can also get information about other cars, such as their driving speed, or if they’re applying brakes; we don’t need to observe it. And it would be great to get information about traffic signals as I approach them so I’ll know when to stop, or how fast I should drive to go through the next three signals while they’re green. But for drivers, I think it will be very seamless; they won’t know whether it’s V2V, V2I, or sensors that provide guidance.”

Not Driverless, but “Automated
and Connected”

One facility that is actively studying all three is the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), which took the lead in a recently completed $31-million gov-ernment-funded Connected Vehicle Safety Pilot Model Deployment that placed nearly 3,000 V2V-enabled vehicles on the streets of Ann Arbor, MI, including nearly 2,600 private cars, three passenger buses, and 19 other

1 Frequency of Target Crashes for IntelliDrive Safety Systems (DOT HS 811 381), October 2010 2 http://www.its.dot.gov/connected vehicle/connected vehicle research.htm - December 3, 2013 3 http://www.its.dot.gov/connected vehicle/connected vehicle research.htm - December 3, 2013