With all the talk of autonomous vehicles lately, we can't help but think those futuristic, 1950s-Popular Science visions of a pipe-smoking Mr. Businessman, reading his paper and having coffee during his morning commute while his car takes care of the driving, seem startlingly close to reality. Most of the hype comes courtesy of the "Urban Challenge," an autonomous vehicle competition hosted by government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The object of this competition (frequently covered on Wired.com's Defense Watch blog) is to help the military achieve a 2015 goal that would call for thirty percent of its land vehicles to be fully autonomous (no soldier inside, fewer potential casualties, less chance for bad press). Well, John Voelcker has written a piece for the tech magazine IEEE Spectrum, in which he convincingly argues that communication will play a greater role in the future of driving than autonomy. He cites GM's innovative Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) system as a prime example of the sort of technological interconnectedness that will help ease traffic congestion, lessen the danger of blind spots, and intervene in situations when a collision is deemed imminent.
Photos courtesy of General Motors.
