The cars of the future won’t just communicate with one another: they’ll connect to everything, from traffic lights to bends in the road. Even pedestrians.
Automotive supplier Delphi is so confident of the concept, it’s even trademarked the ‘V2E’ acronym.
To get to a world with zero car crashes, says its chief technology officer Jeff Owens at CES 2016, “we will need a convergence of active safety, sensor fusion, connectivity platforms and advanced software.”
Bullishly, he claims “Delphi has proven we are the only company that has the right mix of all these”.
5 things cars will communicate with
To illustrate its V2E technology, Delphi is demonstrating a car at CES featuring five things that connected cars of the future will be connected with:
- Other cars – vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) comms allows Delphi’s car to see all other cars nearby – and sense if one’s about to cut you up
- Pedestrians – the Delphi car can send an alert to a pedestrian’s smartphone if they’re looking down at it and not watching the traffic
- Traffic lights – the Delphi car knows what signal’s showing on all nearby traffic lights: it thus anticipates yellows and reds
- The road – blind corners will no longer be blind
- Friends and family – drivers can notify them of their location and see if they need a lift (or simply reassure them they’re almost home)
Sounds futuristic? Not so; next year, Delphi’s launching industry-first V2V tech on the 2017 Cadillac CTS, called Super Cruise.
And if you’re not a 2017 CTS driver, Delphi has another claimed industry first: an aftermarket V2V unit that will allow any cars to communicate with one another…
