Talking cars could be a reality in future!

Can you imagine cars becoming intelligent? That is what going to happen in near future; cars that can talk with each other and communicate among themselves when something goes wrong, warn the other cars beforehand. Imagine how easy it would become to avoid traffic jams and motorway pile-ups. The car makers have been working towards deploying this safety technology for about a decade, and when it does happen, no wonder it would appear to be a scene straight out of a James Bond or a Sci-fi movie. They hope to introduce this technology in production models by 2015 which sounds more like 2020.   

The cars do not need actual facial features to communicate with each other says the team of researchers from the University of Bologna.  The team Leader of the research team Prof. Marco Roccetti has said that the software they have developed is not like the conventional system where one car communicates with the other using a radar mechanism and the signal breaks as and when it encounters an obstacle right in front of it, but it is more like relaying Wi-Fi and GPS signals to communicate with the vehicles in kilometres of radius.  The communication between the cars is established through acceleration sensors that are built into the cars and these ‘acceleration sensors’ record the change in acceleration experienced by the car as and when something untoward happens to the vehicle, such as a car crash and then the signals are relayed to the other cars there-by reducing the risk of roadblocks or further accidents. One of the team members of the research team Prof Gustavo Marfia has said that this software can be either deployed directly into the car dashboard or in the sat-nav or into their Wi-Fi enabled Smartphone which can perceive or relay signals for their owners. It is believed that this application will help reduce the motorways pile-ups by 40%.

One problem they could foresee with this system is, if the car involved in a crash starts communicating with every other car behind it, this may lead to a data jam and confusion. The team then has come up with a scheme that sends the signals selectively to those cars that can send the signal as far as possible. The cars will be involved in constantly swapping the data and there-by knowing which car is in the best position to relay the information.

According to a journal that published the report on the team of scientists involved in the development of this software conveys that the road tests of the software will take place on the motorways of Los Angeles  in August, 2011 in conjunction with the Japan-based auto giant Toyota Motor Corp.