The United States Department of Transportation has presented a national road safety plan (PDF) that will allow vehicles to communicate with each other. The agency hopes that widespread implementation of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology will boost its “commitment to taking a comprehensive approach to reducing road deaths to zero.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Estimates that 40,990 people died in car accidents last year.
V2X allows vehicles to stay in contact with each other, as well as with pedestrians, cyclists, other road users and road infrastructure. It allows them to share information such as their position and speed, as well as road conditions. They could do this in situations with poor visibility, such as on bends and in dense fog. National Public Radio grades.
The U.S. Department of Transportation said in its National V2X Deployment Plan that a nationwide rollout of V2X will require a range of mobile, in-vehicle and roadside technologies that can communicate efficiently and securely while protecting people’s personal information. The agency said smaller-scale V2X deployments across the country have demonstrated safety benefits. Safety advocates say the technology could prevent hundreds of thousands of accidents and mitigate the impact of any collisions that do occur by reducing impact speeds.
The DoT’s plan timeline extends to 2036, by which time it hopes to have fully deployed V2X technology across the National Highway System, with all 75 major metropolitan areas having the technology enabled at 85 percent of signalized intersections and having 20 vehicle models that are V2X-capable. In the near term, the agency aims to have V2X technology installed at 20 percent of the National Highway System and 25 percent of signalized intersections in major metropolitan areas by 2028.
It won’t be an easy task, as a wide range of stakeholders have to be involved, including the Federal Communications Commission, which the DoT says will have to determine rules on spectrum allocation. Suppliers to automakers (who will build V2X-enabled components), freight transport operators and app developers are also stakeholders in the DoT’s vision.
There are some concerns, particularly in terms of cybersecurity and how to cover the costs of implementing the technology (although the Federal Highway Administration recently announced nearly $60 million in grants). technology-grants-arizona-texas-and-utah” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank” data-ylk=”slk:related to V2X;elm:context_link;elmt:doNotAffiliate;cpos:6;pos:1;itc:0;sec:content-canvas”>V2X related). But V2X has the potential to prevent thousands of deaths and serious injuries.
“The Department has reached a key milestone today by designing a national plan for the transportation industry that has the power to save lives and transform the way we travel,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. said in a statement“The Department recognizes the potential safety benefits of V2X, and this plan will bring us closer to nationwide adoption of this technology.”
“This plan is a vital first step toward realizing the full life-saving potential of this technology — a technology that could prevent as many as 615,000 accidents,” said National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy. The NTSB has determined that V2X deployments could have prevented many fatal accidents over the past few decades. Homendy pointed outThe agency has been advocating for technology Since 1995.
As you might imagine, V2X is not a new concept. Several automakers, including Audi, Toyota and Volkswagen, have long been working on ways for their cars to communicate with each other and with city infrastructure, in part because that is a factor in autonomous driving.
During the Obama administration, there was an attempt to make vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication a mandatory feature on new cars, but the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration scrapped that plan during the Trump administration.
The rollout of V2X has been slowed by “regulatory uncertainty,” said John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group for automakers. “This is the reset button,” Bozzella added, according to National Public Radio“This implementation plan is a big step. It is a crucial piece of this V2X puzzle.”
