Yesterday, President Obama gave a speech in Virginia calling for mandatory installation of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications in all cars. By coincidence, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) is holding its annual symposium on autonomous (that is, driverless) cars in California.
V2V allows vehicles to communicate with one another to allow them to avoid accidents, while V2I allows highway infrastructure (such as traffic signals) to communicate directly with motor vehicles. While Obama touts the safety benefits of these technologies, there are at least four reasons why they should not be mandatory.
First, V2V and V2I communications pose serious security risks for travelers and cities. With V2V communications, an automobile that suffers a fender-bender would communicate to all nearby vehicles that they ought to take a different route to avoid congestion.
That sounds good, but what happens when someone hacks the system and puts out radio signals in a hundred or a thousand critical urban intersections that effectively shut down traffic in an entire city? As one expert at the driverless vehicle symposium observed, “just think of the opportunities for chaos!”
Second, V2I communications will allow the nanny state to monitor and control when and where you travel. For example, PC Magazine observes that V2I is “so accurate a revenue-hungry town could write tickets for doing 57 in a 55 zone.”
If you are experienced in a certain way, however, it can be relieved cialis canadian pharmacy and it does not inflict lasting damage on their relationship. There is no substantial scientific evidence that it works as a order viagra from india libido booster, taking damiana will set you stress free for sure. DHEA is a precursor to the sex hormones. viagra canada pharmacy It had on line cialis already crossed 1 year. Worse, suppose your state decides to cut per capita driving in half, which isn’t far fetched considering that in 2008 the Washington legislature passed a law mandating such a reduction by 2050. With V2I communications, the government could decide you have driven enough and simply shut off your car.
Third, what happens when all cars are dependent on V2I systems that the government can’t afford to maintain? The federal government is notorious for funding capital projects and then providing inadequate money to maintain them, and state and local governments are little better.
Finally, V2V and V2I communications will be unnecessary added expense to auto ownership. The Department of Transportation says it won’t even have a draft of rules mandating V2V before 2017, and such rules won’t possibly go into effect before 2018. Yet partially autonomous cars are already on the market that improve safety by providing steering assistance and collision avoidance.
Google, Nissan, and other companies expect cars will be on the market by 2020 that will be completely driverless in many situations. These cars will improve safety using sensors detecting all other vehicles, pedestrians, and other objects around them, yet they won’t send or receive any signals that could violate user privacy or allow outside parties to control the cars.
These cars will achieve the same safety benefits claimed for V2V without the expense or security problems. Other manufacturers at the driverless car symposium say V2I systems would make the problem of computer-driven cars a little easier to solve, but they don’t trust the government to install or maintain the systems in a timely fashion.
I strongly support new technologies that will enhance personal mobility as well as new ways of financing roads and other infrastructure that insure that users pay for the cost of what they use without invading anyone’s privacy. V2V and V2I systems offer too many ways to invade privacy and allow government control without providing any greater safety benefits than will come from increasingly autonomous cars.
Soon all the upper class will be driving autonomous vehicles with V2V and V2I systems and the rest of us will be hanging onto our older vehicles without all that crap to guard our independence. I’m sure the government will act punitively toward those that resist such an invasion of privacy.
Similarly driverless trucks, forklifts, etc.
http://www.siemens.com/innovation/en/news/2009/navigation-system-for-driverless-forklifts.htm
Makes me think about taking car-repair classes at the vocational school, so I can keep an older “off-the-grid” car running.
I share The Antiplanners concern about this, but I don’t think it is something to stay awake nights worrying about. The technology is advancing quickly enough the government won’t be able to catch up.
“…but what happens when someone hacks the system…”
Isn’t that the conspiracy theorist biggest problem with driverless cars?
“Second, V2I communications will allow the nanny state to monitor and control when and where you travel. For example, PC Magazine observes that V2I is ‘so accurate a revenue-hungry town could write tickets for doing 57 in a 55 zone.'”
Speaking of conspiracy theories. why are police (the paws of the nanny state) letting people speed 9 mph over the limit right now? That’s a massive “could”.
“Third, what happens when all cars are dependent on V2I systems that the government can’t afford to maintain? The federal government is notorious for funding capital projects and then providing inadequate money to maintain them, and state and local governments are little better.”
There it is! You should just lead and ended with this one. I was surprised I had to read so far down before you got to this point. Government is trying to get involved (all be it something that clearly concerns them), and we know that antiplanners will oppose government doing almost anything outside of protecting our shores.
The Antiplanner wrote:
Second, V2I communications will allow the nanny state to monitor and control when and where you travel. For example, PC Magazine observes that V2I is “so accurate a revenue-hungry town could write tickets for doing 57 in a 55 zone.”
Two issues here:
(1) The state can monitor where you are and where you travel right now with the use of advanced license plate reader (ALPR) technology.
(2) The quote from PC Magazine brings up a more macro-scale problem. If mileage-based user fees (MBUF) were to be imposed, would some municipalities see that as an opportunity to impose excessive fees on vehicles belonging to drivers from outside the corporate limits of town – perhaps as a surrogate commuter tax, or just as a way to collect money from drivers that do not vote in local elections (other, current examples include rental car taxes and hotel taxes).
Don’t worry, just cover your car in tinfoil to protect it from the evil government V2V and V2I!
You do realize they all receive GPS signals to determine where they are? GPS is vulnerable to spoofing and can be degraded and even shut down by the government for security reasons. If you’re worried about the security implications of V2I or V2V it seems strange to ignore GPS . . .
Right, I’m sure it will be just as unreliable and poorly maintained as the government’s notoriously bad GPS.
“why are police (the paws of the nanny state) letting people speed 9 mph over the limit right now?” Because the police know that their own speedometers, and yours, are not all that accurate. if you lose 1/2″ of tread from an 18″ tire, your speedo reading changes by close to 4%.
As for the vulnerability of GPS, don’t forget that the Chinese and Russians are rumored to have plans to knock out the GPS satellites with kinetic energy weapons. meaning they’ll launch gravel into an orbit intersecting GPS satellites at miles per second.
As for the reliability of the whole mess, how often do you still have to reboot your computer? Our best software is so bad we need to reboot? What happens if your system needs a reboot at 80 mph in heavy traffic? What happens if some DOT version of Lois Lerner finds it expedient to crash and burn a few hard drives?
How often do you have to reboot your car? All modern cars contain many computer controls functions and if they fail the car will not run. However, car failure because of software glitches is very rare. Personal computers trade reliability for the flexibility to runs many programs, often at the same time. Car control software will do one thing, drive the car, but will do it very reliably.
Thanks for the insightful posting.
I don’t worry as much about the hacking of V2V – as a software guy who was a hacker a long, long time ago, I find that too many people think that every computer/communications system can be hacked. It’s not so, if they’re well design. Of course, we are talking about the government that designed (via contract) healthcare.gov and paid about 50 times more than appropriate, so maybe you’re right.
Too often, and this is a case of it, the government mandates technology before the market and technologists have had time to sort things out. We see this a lot with “green energy” mandates. V2V and V2I fall into that category. One or the other will probably prove useful at some point, but mandating it now is just plain dumb.
There may be a role for government in solving coordination problems if the winning technologies only work by having everyone on the road using them. That is a big if, of course, and governments are not well known for picking winners, especially this early in the product cycle.
To me the big take away is having a Democrat president sign up to driverless technology. This is tremendously positive, given (modern) liberal scepticism I have seen against driverless technology that seems based in rejection of the freedom that private vehicles deliver. Environmentalists ought to be signing up for this technology as well: those at least indifferent to liberty and who actually care about the environment are.
I do think worries about government failure to maintain V2I are well founded. Which is why vehicle based technologies like Google’s may be the right transition technology, since it does not depend on everyone else, or even anyone else, having driverless technology. Dedicated fast lanes for cars supporting V2V give a natural transition path that does not require government to intervene.
It seems to me Federal govt should focus on solving legislative barriers and liability problems rather than picking standards now and making them compulsory. It’s a lot harder, and less sexy, to ask states to design legislative reform programs that will accommodate driverless technology, but it seems to me that is where Obama can help most.