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VW Golfs in Europe will communicate with wireless safety tech
The newest generation of Volkswagen's popular Golf will get the ability to communicate directly with other cars with wireless technology called V2X -- short for vehicle to everything. The technology has been slow to catch on but has the potential to reduce accident rates, which is the reason Volkswagen's adding it to its cars in Europe.
The Golf is the first major car model to get the V2X ability, and Volkswagen and its V2X chip supplier, NXP Semiconductors, hope the milestone will encourage others to follow suit. The more vehicles and infrastructure like traffic signals with the V2X communication ability, the more useful it becomes.
"Volkswagen includes this technology, which doesn't involve any user fees, as a standard feature to accelerate V2X penetration in Europe," said Johannes Neft, Volkswagen's head of vehicle body development, in a statement Monday.
V2X has the potential to revolutionize car safety by letting cars pay better attention to their surroundings, in all directions at once simultaneously and without getting drowsy like a human driver. V2X also could become an important foundation for autonomous vehicles, though leading companies like Waymo and Cruise aren't counting on it for now.
However, there are two incompatible versions of V2X technology: the older V2X standard one Volkswagen and NXP endorse, based on a variation of Wi-Fi networking, and a newer effort called C-V2X that uses the same mobile network technology as your phone.
The older standard, called Wi-Fi-p and pWLAN in Europe and Digital Short-Range Communications (DSRC) in the US, has been under development for about two decades but hasn't caught on except in pockets.
C-V2X has the advantage of using technology cars might build in directly anyway so they can download software updates, refresh map and traffic data, and offer streaming video to passengers. C-V2X also has the backing of powerful wireless network industry players who right now are eager to promote new uses of their nascent 5G networks.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Thursday October 31 2019, @11:01AM (7 children)
Cars taking advantage of algorithms to get other cars to give them preference could potentially lead to an increase in efficiency of one group of vehicles at the expense of overall efficiency.
And there is certainly precedent for gaming the system.
But...how do you market the fact that you are cheating without being found out?
On the fuel efficiency (Dieselgate) numbers it was straightforward, you just got a better number to publish and people are happy buying your vehicle based on it. But they don't do those tests out in live traffic, so you can't expect the cheat to be useful in the same way, and you certainly can't tell people you are doing it.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Thursday October 31 2019, @03:12PM
How do the super rich and entitled manage to presently collude about scams to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense?
Old boy networks. Special member's only clubs. Access to this feature by invitation only sponsored by someone else who already has it.
Good idea: include technical measures that make this bad behavior difficult or impossible to detect. Or that destroy any evidence that this feature existed in this vehicle. Gee, I can't imagine how that signal was transmitted, there is nothing in the firmware for that after the latest Windows 10 update. Oh, wait. We don't want vehicle crashes.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday October 31 2019, @03:16PM (1 child)
Unlike Dieselgate, vehicles would need to have had this cheat feature added after the fact, rather than included from the factory.
Even in a vehicle so equipped, tie the cheating behavior to specific individual drivers, so that testing by a government agency is unlikely to reveal the feature.
Detect that the vehicle is at a specific government testing agency, and destroy the feature leaving no trace of it. The prick BMW owner must later have vehicle "serviced" to re-enable the cheat feature.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Thursday October 31 2019, @04:52PM
Hmmm, there's an embedded assumption there.
I mean, it may not be possible to detect if you are at a testing agency.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Unixnut on Thursday October 31 2019, @03:58PM (3 children)
> But...how do you market the fact that you are cheating without being found out?
Simple, change the laws so its perfectly legal to do so.
I can imagine a future, where this technology is adapted as a kind of "pay per mile" toll system. There must be traffic priorities built into the system, because you know, emergency vehicles must be able to get past traffic.
Next, politicians will demand a higher priority for themselves, because they are important people on important business.
Then finally, I can imagine a world where you can pay for "priority access", not unlike in airlines now. So the rich will be able to afford traffic priority over the rest. How much priority depending on how much you want to pay per mile.
If you are not one of the above groups, tough luck. If your time is not important enough for you to pay for faster travel, then you can waste your life in more traffic. Eventually some people will get annoyed with the situation, create black market devices which transmit a higher traffic priority, and so starts a cat-ant-mouse game with law enforcement.
Plus ça change....
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Thursday October 31 2019, @04:55PM (1 child)
This is depressingly realistic.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday November 01 2019, @11:48AM
> This is depressingly realistic.
That's because it already exists. Except its not automated and all encompassing.
Case in point, you have to yield to emergency vehicles with flashing lights (police, ambulances, fire trucks, etc....). Nobody really minds this, because the emergency vehicles are supposed to only use their lights when it is an actual emergency/threat to human life.
Politicians and Rich/VIPs can get a police escort, or the roads are blocked by police so they can get past. Effective priority by (ab)use of the above law.
The main issue is that getting your own police escort is hard for the "normal rich", you can't just pay for it. This new system, apart from being horribly Orwellian, will allow the "normal rich" to get priority as well. This has already started in London with things like the "Congestion charge" and "ULEZ", which track cars using number plates, and charge you daily.
The effects are:
- The poor can't afford to have a car anymore, so are beholden to whatever poor alternatives exist.
- The rich get emptier roads to drive on, as for them the extra cost is just a rounding error on their monthly statements.
- Costs go up for all goods and services within the area, because commercial vehicles also have to pay, and they just pass the cost on to the customer in the form of higher end costs. This disproportionately affects the poor again.
This system is just more of the above, except it should be possible to enforce it on all the roads, everywhere. At the moment you can avoid the above by just moving out of the area (which is what I did), but a national (or global) scale network will be much harder to get away from. Especially if future self driving cars become popular, as the occupants of said car will have no say in what route it takes and how long it takes to get there. It will be set by priority.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Thursday October 31 2019, @10:32PM
Yeah. It's called Fast Pass.
I got a story about that, but I'm not reliving that nightmare.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A