A world without car crashes? Is it possible?
You’ve heard about Google’s experiments with self-driving vehicles. Less well known but equally important is V2V (vehicle to vehicle communication): vehicles communicating in real time to share information about their location, velocity, status, and the surrounding environment. The Internet of cars could eliminate most traffic accidents, even if we still allow humans to continue driving.
But wait, there’s more! As an article in the Atlantic Cities (A World Without Car Crashes) says:
…safety applications could be just the beginning. Because once you create a ubiquitous “internet of cars” — a world where vehicles, roads, traffic signals, and transportation authorities are all sharing information in real-time — the results could be as wide-reaching, dynamic, and creative as they’ve been for that other Internet…some think it could bring about the biggest change in how we transport ourselves since the car was first invented
Sounds great; I for one welcome our vehicular overlords. But like the real Internet, they may be gotchas and boomerang effects. What happens if the Internet of cars is hacked? Will there be the equivalent of spam? What about privacy?
And, perhaps most crucially, will this just lead to more binge driving?