US To Require Cars to Communicate With Each Other

[misg]

So...is this just like having transponders in cars, so you know when you are too close (and the government can monitor your every movement)?

...

Eh, they tried legislating better and more fuel efficient cars a few years back, but that got shot down to to freedom.

Yeah i have a very high trust of the US government to not abuse this. Add on the fact that the US is considering taxing cars by the mile this will allow them to do it.

 

[MrFalconfly]

I sure hope this stays as an option and not a requirement.

I like driving. I like shifting manually and I like all the aspects of driving a car.

Just because the US cocked up basic licensing doesn't mean we should do a hardware workaround full stop (imagine a world without any analogue sportscars like the Mazda MX5 or the Toyota GT86. That'd be a truly joyless world).

 

[Slash2x]

BAHAHAHAH!!! Yeah..... THIS IS ALREADY BAD ENOUGH! Please PLEASE lets add a built in WIFI TO each car that RUNS ON THE SAME SYSTEM! So if you know how to hack one then you know how to hack them all. This is why we need to have a cut off for the age of the people running our country. The morons in charge do not even know what they are voting on....

 

[lacktheknack]

If it gets hacked, so what?

You'll suddenly be left driving as if the system wasn't in place, ie. what we're doing now.

 

[lacktheknack]

BAHAHAHAH!!! Yeah..... THIS IS ALREADY BAD ENOUGH! Please PLEASE lets add a built in WIFI TO each car that RUNS ON THE SAME SYSTEM! So if you know how to hack one then you know how to hack them all. This is why we need to have a cut off for the age of the people running our country. The morons in charge do not even know what they are voting on....

Neither do you.

<quote=OP>According to the press release, the current plan is for the communication systems to provide warnings to the human driver to respond to,

So if it gets hacked, the worst case scenario is that you get a bunch of warning signs.

So shush.

 

[FalloutJack]

You know what this is going to do to drivers instead of warn them? Freak them out. How would you like an unexpected voice or buzz or beep from nowhere suddenly shouting out? That'll break the flow of concentration worse than another car you might not immediately see, one where you might react to avoid that problem instead of possibly being startled at the exact worst moment, which could cause you to get into a far worse wreck than you might've been in.

This will not be embraced without severe trouble. You need better drivers, not things that beep at us. The accident will only be made worse by a sudden distraction from the driving that we're doing, especially if the driver is not into this generation of technology. Oh, and you need to stop making fiberglass cars. They're SHATTER in a collision.

They use this technology today is some cars and it not bothering the drivers. And as for your last point, which would you rather jump down into from a 10 foot drop, a large block of steel, or a large block of foam. The steel won't budge, and it'll hurt. The foam is going to crumple and absorb the impact. Car that can crumple on impact have saved thousands of lives in the past 30 years.

I feel there is more chance of you being acquainted with the engine block in a rather up-close-and-personal way, rather than you being in a car whose solid matter will not disintegrate and therefore you likeoy don't get past the dashboard...especially if you wore your seatbelt.

 

[2012 Wont Happen]

So...is this just like having transponders in cars, so you know when you are too close (and the government can monitor your every movement)?

...

Eh, they tried legislating better and more fuel efficient cars a few years back, but that got shot down to to freedom.

Yeah i have a very high trust of the US government to not abuse this. Add on the fact that the US is considering taxing cars by the mile this will allow them to do it.

Any proof of that tax by the mile claim, because it sounds like something from a tabloid of a hoax site.

 

[Agayek]

I feel there is more chance of you being acquainted with the engine block in a rather up-close-and-personal way, rather than you being in a car whose solid matter will not disintegrate and therefore you likeoy don't get past the dashboard...especially if you wore your seatbelt.

Sorry, but it's pretty obvious you know practically nothing about the physics involved.

The fact of the matter is that cars with crumple zones are significantly safer than those without. It has to do with absorbing the impact force and reducing the energy transferred into the cab (and therefore into the driver). By crumpling, the car's frame absorbs large amounts of the energy from the impact, either by taking it into itself or releasing the energy into the air as sound. Then the remainder of the energy is carried through the surviving frame and all the way to the cabin, where it ultimately hits the driver.

If the car was a solid steel box and didn't deform, then all of that energy would ultimately be delivered straight to the driver. It doesn't matter how good your seatbelt is or what precautions you take. The human body has a tolerance for impact forces of up to around 25gs. Any higher and you're almost certainly dead. Without crumple zones, the odds of taking a hit that strong are quite high.

 

[FalloutJack]

Zoop

I would say the same in your case, but not as rudely. To a metal vehicle on the road, you are driving a toy. There is far less resistance in such a frame, compared to a metal car which is essentially armor plating. It takes more punishment, allowing the owner (more often than not) to live, AND the car is probably salvageable. A fiberglass car will definitely break, may not be salvageable, and may not be able to save your life.

 

[Agayek]

I would say the same in your case, but not as rudely. To a metal vehicle on the road, you are driving a toy. There is far less resistance in such a frame, compared to a metal car which is essentially armor plating. It takes more punishment, allowing the owner (more often than not) to live, AND the car is probably salvageable. A fiberglass car will definitely break, may not be salvageable, and may not be able to save your life.

There is less resistance - that's the point.

The problem is that you're thinking that a metal car is like armor plating, and that's a terrible way to think of it, because it's terribly inaccurate and doesn't account for much any of the physical factors involved. From a purely physical standpoint, a much better analogy would be to ask "Would you rather run trip and fall face first into a steel floor or six inches of foam?", because that's the same principle behind crumple zones.

There's decades of research on the subject proving it, go look some up. The fact of the matter is, crumple zones substantially reduce the risk to passengers by dramatically reducing the impact forces that get transferred to them. There's dozens upon dozens of proofs of this concept in pretty much every relevant crash test over the last 30 years.

 

[FalloutJack]

Zoop

Your analogy has nothing to do with the physics of cars and crashes. Please give me something better to work with. They don't buy fiberglass cars for safety. They buy it for speed because it's lighter, which also means it's probably hitting solid objects twice as fast as everyone else. And frankly? You hit ANYTHING fast enough, it will still injure or even kill. Tell me about anyone who falls flat into water. It's water, totally fluid, but BAM that can hurt too.

 

[Blow_Pop]

You know what this is going to do to drivers instead of warn them? Freak them out. How would you like an unexpected voice or buzz or beep from nowhere suddenly shouting out? That'll break the flow of concentration worse than another car you might not immediately see, one where you might react to avoid that problem instead of possibly being startled at the exact worst moment, which could cause you to get into a far worse wreck than you might've been in.

This will not be embraced without severe trouble. You need better drivers, not things that beep at us. The accident will only be made worse by a sudden distraction from the driving that we're doing, especially if the driver is not into this generation of technology. Oh, and you need to stop making fiberglass cars. They're SHATTER in a collision.

as a person who use the "dsitance monitor" that beeps once the front or back gets too close to another object (a godsend for parking in tight spaces since it actually shows the distance) i disagree about peopel freaking out about beeping. it may be true the first time, but once you get used to it you can determine the distance jut by beeping intensity without having to even look at it, its a helper not a hindrance.

you are obviously failing to take into account people like southern california drivers. I swear to god. ANYTHING happens and the entire southern part of the state slams on their brakes. Weather goes from sunny to slightly cloudy? slam on brakes. Few drops of water(even if it's from someone in front of you cleaning their windows and not having their jets aimed right) on your windshield? slam on brakes. Road curves slightly to left or right? slam on brakes. Road goes uphill/downhill? slam on brakes.

Heaven forbid you use your turn signal out here too....I can't count the amount of accidents I avoid daily because I swear to the gods, Southern Californians are stupid once you put them behind the wheel. Two days ago, I saw two cars almost hit two other cars. SAME FUCKING INSTANCE AND INTERSECTION. We are scary fucks on the road.


OT: I both like and dislike this idea. Dislike because as previously stated, my state has a bunch of dumbfucks with licenses and cars. I like the potential for it.

 

[Agayek]

Your analogy has nothing to do with the physics of cars and crashes. Please give me something better to work with. They don't buy fiberglass cars for safety. They buy it for speed because it's lighter, which also means it's probably hitting solid objects twice as fast as everyone else. And frankly? You hit ANYTHING fast enough, it will still injure or even kill. Tell me about anyone who falls flat into water. It's water, totally fluid, but BAM that can hurt too.

Uhh... you realize that water is incompressible right? It gives no fuck what hits it, it doesn't give or compress in the slightest, very much unlike foam. If you're lucky, the shape you hit it in is aquadynamic enough to let it flow around you without imparting undue force, but that's pretty rate. Water is one of the worst things to hit at speed, in terms of cushioning the impact and reducing the damage done. It's much closer to steel than foam, for the purposes of this comparison. That's pretty much the worst example you could have provided to make your point.

And you're right, they don't buy fiberglass cars for safety, or at least not only. It's both cheaper and lighter, meaning higher top speeds, better gas mileage, and either lower prices or higher profit margins. That doesn't change the fact that a crumple zone in a car is, effectively, a cushion. It behaves on the exact same principles as a piece of foam does when hit. It allows the force of the impact to deform the material, robbing it of some portion of its energy or force (how much depends on the material) before it continues on to whatever's behind it.

It's exactly like the analogy I gave above. Two objects collide, and when one or both of the objects have sufficient amounts of cushion (read: can deform to absorb impacts), the collision is much less jarring and severe to either.

Now, you're right in that having crumple zones and the like means that most cars aren't going to survive after a strong impact. The frame will, by its nature, have been deformed and while you can beat it back into shape, it will be expensive and never end up as good as it was originally. That doesn't mean it's any less safe, just more expensive if you frequently wreck cars.

 

[Spygon]

We want to put chips in everything your own you know just in case.

 

[FalloutJack]

Boingy?

I'm sorry, but I just don't understand here. Fiberglass is not soft. The cars made of the stuff are essentually molded into a shape around the inner parts of said car to make the aerodynamic frames. And if it hits things harder than a poke, it has a tendency to chip, crack, break, and so on. Where in there is that Charmin touch? Explainitude this!

 

[Slash2x]

Neither do you.

<quote=OP>According to the press release, the current plan is for the communication systems to provide warnings to the human driver to respond to,

So if it gets hacked, the worst case scenario is that you get a bunch of warning signs.

So shush.

I am not going to get into a flame war with a clear attempt at insult. You do not know what I know or do not know. Nor do you know what I do or do not vote for. If you read my ENTIRE post

Please PLEASE lets add a built in WIFI TO each car that RUNS ON THE SAME SYSTEM! So if you know how to hack one then you know how to hack them all.

I was comentting on the addition of a mandatory wireless system that would be designed to communicate with all the other cars in the nearby area. To spell that out, putting a common system into each car on the road means that like all other wifi all somone would have to do is locate a weakness in the system and then exploit that to gain access to the entire network. In this case that would be the entire cars electrical components controlled by the CPU in the car. Like the antilock brakes or the steering as shown in the video.

 

[TIMESWORDSMAN]

OH MAN! I remeber being nine years old and reading about this in Popular Science! It was awesome! They said it would only be a few years and it's been way longer but now it's finally-

"The DOT has not given any specific timeframe in which it anticipates this plan to be enacted"

God dammit. It's not happn'n.

--------
On a side note, I just realized I've never heard of any other nine year-old who had a subscription to Popular Science.

 

[Agayek]

I'm sorry, but I just don't understand here. Fiberglass is not soft. The cars made of the stuff are essentually molded into a shape around the inner parts of said car to make the aerodynamic frames. And if it hits things harder than a poke, it has a tendency to chip, crack, break, and so on. Where in there is that Charmin touch? Explainitude this!

It's not soft in the conventional sense, no.

But it is flexible, and that's what "soft" is, ultimately. The idea behind crumple zones is for it to, well, crumple, or "accordian" if you prefer that parlance, when it hits something. That deformation of the material robs energy from the impact and therefore makes it safer for the occupants. It's due to the interactions between colliding objects and Newton's laws and all sorts of fancy physics. The core idea though is derived from the Force equation (F=ma, or to be more accurate, F=m(dv/dt)). The crumple zones collapse over time, increasing the duration of the impact and therefore increasing the value of t in the preceding equation. Because t is inversely proportional to F, greater values of t mean lower values of F. And lower values of F means less force is involved in the collision and therefore the occupant is safer.

You can find more information on it here: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/safety-regulatory-devices/crumple-zone.htm

 

[FalloutJack]

Soft?

I would define plexi/fiberglass as pliable, bendable, even flexible, but soft is reserved for my bed, my pillow, my fleece sweaters, and other things that involve fabric, cotton, or what-have-you. Flexible to me is more like rubber. May not actually be soft. It doesn't, on the whole, make me feel safer. Accordians are not exactly my style OR the state I really want my car in, per se. I'm Irish, so find me a bagpipe car!

 

[Agayek]

I would define plexi/fiberglass as pliable, bendable, even flexible, but soft is reserved for my bed, my pillow, my fleece sweaters, and other things that involve fabric, cotton, or what-have-you. Flexible to me is more like rubber. May not actually be soft. It doesn't, on the whole, make me feel safer. Accordians are not exactly my style OR the state I really want my car in, per se. I'm Irish, so find me a bagpipe car!

I'm not arguing whether or not it makes you feel safer. I have less than zero influence on that, and don't particularly care.

Reality very rarely gives the slightest amount of fucks for what you feel though, and the fact is that you are safer in the cars with crumple zones.