General Motors, the largest US automotive company and parent of brands such as Chevrolet, Cadillac and Opel, has announced that cars featuring vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology and hands-free driving will be arriving in 2016. GM Chief Executive Mary Barra unveiled the news at the Intelligent Transport Society in Detroit.
V2V communication could remove human error from the top of the list of contributing factors in motor accidents – which kill millions of people globally each year. The cost of these accidents, both financial and personal, could soon be removed if these V2V systems can be successfully deployed and adopted. On top of this, Barra pointed to the 5.5 billion hours and 2.9 billion gallons of fuel wasted each year by congestion, which could be avoided entirely or drastically reduced by advances in V2V technology.
The first vehicle GM will sell with the V2V capabilities will be the Cadillac CTS sedan, however, GM says that the CTS will only be able to communicate with similarly equipped vehicles – which will be complicated by the overwhelming lack of compatible vehicles thanks to the ratio of new to used cars on the roads.
But it won’t just be other cars that the CTS will take to. Fixed infrastructure, such as traffic lights and street lighting, will be used as points in a mesh network that feeds live information to all the compatible vehicles on the roads.
Barra said “I’m convinced customers will embrace V2V and automated driving technologies for one simple reason: they are the answer to everyday problems that people want solved.” And by the looks of it, this technology will be sold as a high-spec feature, as Barra emphatically observed, “having it done for you – that’s true luxury.”
The GM technology will include the Super Cruise feature, which enables hands-free driving at highway and urban speeds. It offers lane following and speed control, with emergency braking; essentially adding steering functionality to adaptive cruise control. It won’t guide the car by itself, but it can feed any information gathered from compatible vehicles and infrastructure in a 300 meter range – providing a valuable heads-up and early warning to potential hazards up ahead. If the car feels the driver has not taken appropriate action, it will then intervene to avoid a crash.
It’s also likely that this feature will work its way from the top of the range towards the bottom, given that the CTS is a premium model and that a rumored flagship model based on the Elmiraj concept car is in development, and GM won’t confirm or deny that this is the second-confirmed car that will feature Super Cruise.
“We’re not going to wait until we perfect a driverless system,” said Jon Lauckner, GM’s CTO. “We’re going to take a leadership position by saying it’s time to get going on the deployment of V2V technologies.” Combining an ad-hoc network of information-gathering vehicles and traffic infrastructure with the semi-hands-off capability is not being sold as a feature to make driving easier or an experience that requires less attention to be paid to the road. As GM Director of Active Safety Electronics, John Capp, said “the sensing technology is not yet to the point where the driver can check out, but we don’t want to wait for 100 percent autonomous vehicles. We need to bring out new models. This is technology we can bring out now.”