The US Department of Transportation has laid out a nationwide road safety plan [PDF] that will lead to cars communicating with each other. The agency is hoping that broadly deploying vehicle-to-everything (V2X) tech will boost its “commitment to pursue a comprehensive approach to reduce the number of roadway fatalities to zero.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 40,990 people died in motor vehicle crashes last year.
V2X enables vehicles to stay in touch with each other as well as pedestrians, cyclists, other road users and roadside infrastructure. It lets them share information such as their position and speed, as well as road conditions. They’d be able to do so in situations with poor visibility, such as around corners and in dense fog, NPR notes.
A US-wide rollout will require an array of mobile, in-vehicle and roadside tech that can communicate efficiently and securely while protecting people’s personal information, the DoT said in its National V2X Deployment Plan. The agency said smaller-scale deployments of V2X across the country have demonstrated safety benefits. Safety advocates claim the tech could prevent hundreds of thousands of crashes and mitigate the impact of collisions that do occur by reducing the speed of impact.
The timeline for the DoT’s plan extends to 2036, by which time it hopes to have fully deployed V2X across the National Highway System, for the top 75 metro areas to have the tech enabled at 85 percent of signalized intersections and to have 20 vehicle models that are V2X capable. In the shorter term, the agency aims to have V2X tech installed across 20 percent of the National Highway System and 25 percent of signalized intersections in major metro areas by 2028.
It won’t be an easy task, as a wide range of stakeholders have to play a part, including the Federal Communications Commission, which the DoT says will have to determine rules about spectrum allocation. Automaker suppliers (which will build V2X-enabled components), freight operators and app developers are also players in the DoT’s vision.
There are some concerns, particularly in terms of cybersecurity and how to cover the costs of rolling out the tech (though the Federal Highway Administration recently announced nearly $60 million in grants related to V2X). But V2X has the potential to prevent thousands of deaths and serious injuries.
“The Department has reached a key milestone today in laying out a national plan for the transportation…