We’ve heard of Google’s self-driving cars; now here come talking cars.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has moved forward with plans to potentially mandate talking-car technology. That may save over a thousand lives per year, according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rule-making notice released Monday.
The vehicle-to-vehicle technology, which has cars automatically exchanging data with one another to warn drivers of a potential crash, could also prevent 592,000 crashes, according to a NHTSA report that includes “preliminary estimates of safety benefits.”
“By warning drivers of imminent danger, V2V technology has the potential to dramatically improve highway safety,” said David Friedman, the NHTSA’s administrator, in a statement. “V2V technology is ready to move toward implementation.”
The report specifically examined two talking-car technologies: one called Left Turn Assistant that “warns drivers not to turn left in front of another vehicle traveling in the opposite direction” and the second called Intersection Movement Assist, which lets drivers know if it’s not safe to enter an intersection due to a “high probability of a collision.”