Joan Lowy of the Associated Press just posted another cogent article on new vehicle technologies that loom on our horizon. I saw this one in the Houston Chronicle on Monday. You should read it; it’s quite interesting. The piece discusses the push of federal safety officials and new technology R&D specialists for “talking cars” that can communicate with each other from up to 300 yards away via vehicle-to-vehicle (v2v) signals and work to avoid a possible crash.
At least that’s the theory. If the technology is working at the time a possible crash is bearing down upon you. You might in fact see this new, computer-dependent technology as just one more thing that can go wrong with your vehicle.
I’m not entirely sure that I’m comfortable with the idea of my car using technology to talk to other vehicles, maybe even to be controlled by them. How can you know what these vehicles are going to say to one another? Do you want your new truck picking up a sleek sports car? Are you sure the technology will be limited to crash avoidance? Do you want a police car to be able to tell your car to tamely pull over? Suppose a bad guy tweaks the technology to issue “stop” commands to vehicles containing what he thinks are likely victims? Or suppose mischievous hackers decide it would be fun to send signals that would cause your car to accelerate uncontrollably until you slam into a bridge pylon?
All of this projected technology appears to be computer-dependent. Given the fail rate of computers that I have experienced lately, I am hesitant to trust my road safety to what I am starting to view as a cranky and unreliable technology. I’m not just playing devil’s advocate here. I’m genuinely leery of entrusting too much control to technology that has shown its vulnerabilities to bugs, glitches, hacking, and incompetent design. I’m not even going to bring up the Obamacare websites here.
The President of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America says that the new technology will allow car manufacturers to concentrate on making your vehicle able to avoid crashes rather than to survive crashes. Given that the discussion of the new technology indicated that it wouldn’t prevent crashes caused by drunken drivers or others willfully heedless of a vehicle’s warning signals, and that drunken drivers cause fully one third of all fatal traffic accidents each year, our Pearland car accident attorneys believe it would be wise to continue to build cars to be crash worthy.
A spokesman for the interests of new vehicle R&D said that even before many vehicles are actually on the roads and equipped with the new v2v technologies, people could use their cell phones and smart phones to enable the v2v applications. They could use them while walking, riding bikes, or sitting at an outdoor café. Given how often my phone drops signals, runs the battery down in less than 1.5 hours, and engages in unnecessary pocket dialing, I don’t think I’m entirely willing to rely on my phone to save me from crashes either.
The article mentioned that the new vehicle technology might alert the vehicle’s driver to the danger of impending crashes via:
I’m just saying that there’s a long way to go before we should entirely entrust our lived to technology. The more complicated technology becomes; the less reliable it seems to become. And I just can’t wait for a future in which our cars have more active social lives than we do.
Click the link to read an earlier discussion posted by the Pearland car accident attorneys at Denena Points, PC regarding v2v technologies.