US to mandate V2V tech

In what could result in the greatest safety breakthrough of the past two decades, US transport safety regulators have outlined a plan calling for cars to have on-board intelligence systems that could eventually prevent more than half a million crashes and 1000 deaths annually due to driver error.

According to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) report, the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) transmitters and associated software that comprise the proposed collision-avoidance technology could cost around $380 per vehicle in 2020.

The V2V system works by enabling cars to swap messages 10 times per second about their position in space, the precise direction they’re headed and how quickly they’re moving in that direction.

If two cars are on a collision course, the driver can be presented a warning to allow them to take corrective action.

This is a big advancement over existing collision-avoidance systems, as this information cannot be gathered by cameras, radars or other sensors.

The V2V system could, for example, warn drivers to stop their vehicle if another car is about to run a red light, or to warn them if they don’t have sufficient time to turn across the path of oncoming traffic.

According to the NHTSA report, the technology could prevent between 25,000 and 592,000 crashes annually in the US alone and save between 49 and 1083 lives when the entire vehicle fleet in that country is equipped with V2V devices.

“Safety is our top priority and V2V technology represents the next great advance in saving lives,” said US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “This technology could move us from helping people survive crashes to helping them avoid crashes altogether.”

NHTSA said it would require new cars to have the underlying V2V equipment when standards calling for the same are implemented in the US over the coming years, but it says it will not mandate any specific safety features.

The decision of which features to include as part of their system would be up to the individual car-makers, depending on their engineering capabilities and familiarity with the new technology.

To date, eight manufacturers – Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen – have been collectively developing V2V technology through a group called the Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership (CAMP), while others like Volvo are developing V2V tech independently.

Each CAMP member provided cars for a US pilot project that ran from mid-2012 until late 2013. NHTSA said cars in the pilot project were able to successfully transmit and receive messages from one another despite being made by different manufacturers.