Radioactive: Today a jam, tomorrow the open road?

Tech aims to free up UK's roadways

If car-to-car technology comes through, waiting in jams and skidding on ice patches could be a thing of the past. Futurity Media's Stewart Baines investigates the possibilities - and potential pitfalls.

Wi-fi in airports and 3G on trains are great news for getting on with work while travelling but they don't resolve the problem of endless travelling. The way that communications could have the biggest impact on business travel is not providing anywhere, everywhere personal communications but actually speeding the journey up.

Compared to plane, train and bus travel, motoring down the highways and byways of Britain is considerably more common, and fraught with endless frustration. A delayed flight is irritating but there are distractions, particularly if there's a wi-fi hotspot. Being caught in an hour long tailback on the M1 is cursing time: it's hot and tiresome and you have to concentrate not to slowly pile into the fellow road warrior in front or prang the wing of a queue jumper.

The impact of congestion and accidents is staggering when accumulated. In Germany, according to the Network on Wheels (NOW) consortium, 13 million hours of delay are wasted each year in congestion. Road warriors will be acutely aware of this statistic. NOW also estimates that the 500,000 annual traffic accidents cost the German economy €34bn. If just 10 per cent of these could be avoided, the country would be €3.4bn better off.

The way to tackle the burden of motorway madness is car-to-car (C2C) communications, according to Germany's big four auto manufacturers. Audi, BMW, DaimlerChrysler and Volkswagen have teamed up with the Fraunhofer Institute, computer hardware maker NEC and Siemens to investigate ways that cars could talk directly to one another using wi-fi and other short-range wireless technologies to prevent automobile accidents or help drivers deal with perilous road conditions.

The intention is to develop a set of standards for frequency, authentication and communications that will allow two or more vehicles within radio communications range to connect automatically and establish an ad hoc network. Because the range of a wi-fi link is limited to a few hundred meters, every vehicle also serves as a router, allowing messages to be sent via a multi-hop process to vehicles farther away, otherwise known as mesh networking. The routing algorithm is based on the position of the vehicles and is able to handle the typically fast changes of ad hoc networks.

What's unique about the car-to-car initiative is that it relies on very little fixed infrastructure: instead of a car connecting to an IP cloud, it is essentially a node on a network of other cars, fully meshed with other cars in close proximity. This Vanet (vehicular ad-hoc network) is much more than a bunch of wi-fi access points on wheels. Cars travelling at speed need to be able to pick up other signals in adverse weather and driving conditions, and must also be fail-safe. Latency for instance cannot be allowed if a driver is relying on an impact warning before they take evasive manoeuvres.

The Network on Wheels project is a spin off from the wider Car-to-Car Communications Consortium (C2C CC), a pan-European initiative involving the German car manufacturers along with Fiat, Honda, Opel and Renault, to agree on frequency, topologies and interfaces. The C2C CC is rising to the challenge set by an EC eSafety programme that is seeking to reduce road fatalities by 50 per cent by 2010 and to further improve the efficiency of road traffic. A similar project called Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRG) is also underway in the US.

The NOW project believes that once cars are networked on an ad hoc basis, they could share their sensor and positional data with other cars in close proximity, thereby cutting down the accidents caused by blind corners, attention lapses and unpredictable drivers.

Modern cars contain dozens of sensors that monitor road and meteorological conditions as well as driving style. The next step in automotive engineering is using radar and ultrasound to detect other objects and traffic flow characteristics. Remote vehicle diagnostics will also become common. If all these systems were combined, the modern car will be a supercomputer on wheels. But the real value for traffic management and safety is when this information can be shared on the fly with other vehicles.

For instance, if a vehicle encounters an accident, fog or ice, it can pass the information to other road users in the immediate vicinity of a danger spot. This will give drivers critical time to slow down and prepare for what's ahead. It will not only prevent a significant number of accidents but will also help to prevent the concertina effect on motorways where cars break quickly but set off again slowly. This will have a major impact on reducing tailbacks and delays.

Automated systems that enforce the Highway Code - such as preventing a left turn if a pedestrian is crossing the road - could also be introduced.

But don't expect collision warning to be in your next new motor. There are many barriers to breakdown before C2C can reach critical mass. First and foremost is that it requires significant market penetration. It would be of little value if only Fords could talk to each other so it is crucial that car manufacturers do agree on a way forward. The experience from the IT industry is that joint-working committees and consortium are easy to form but quickly become bogged down in standards battles.

Also C2C needs a cheap, common architecture. But few manufacturers will install it unless compelled to do so or until buyers expect it of them. A chicken and egg scenario emerges. No government would introduce C2C regulation without seeing its effectiveness. But the efficacy of C2C systems is limited by the network effect: the more nodes there are, the more effective it is. Without significant penetration, it would be hard to prove the macroeconomic benefits, never mind safety improvements.

So the market will initially have to be driven by buyers. Telematics and in-car information systems are gradually appearing in ever-greater numbers, particularly in luxury cars. When these trickle down to the budget end of the market and start appearing as common aftermarket accessories in Halfords, C2C chipsets and control software could piggyback their way in.

Another barrier is the frequency open to C2C. It could not easily share unlicensed spectrum so will need a dedicated band. The US has already set aside a 75Mhz band for vehicle communications but in Europe, a tiny 10MHz is available. The NOW and C2C CC will be lobbying Brussels for more spectrum but they admittedly don't expect to have it allocated until 2010. By then, the standards and technologies for C2C should be in place.

Good news for road warriors, less so for environmentalists. These measures may improve traffic flow but the UK's roads are already close to bursting. More cars may be able to squeeze their way onto the tarmac without fear of accident but they may not be travelling very fast.

Stewart Baines is a freelance journalist and director at Futurity Media.