MAY 17

Most drivers know that driving smart can improve fuel mileage, but what if a car could drive smart for you? "Intelligent" cars have been shown to improve fuel efficiency, matching and even improving upon gains provided by hybrids. These cars drive themselves using sensors and receivers to predict traffic conditions and then adjust speed accordingly to prevent "stop-start" driving that decreases efficiency and causes more traffic.

University of Melbourne engineers tested fuel efficiency of hybrids versus "intelligent" cars and found that hybrids got about 15-25% improvement over a non modified car, while the "intelligent" cars boosted efficiency by up to 33%. What surprised me is that the calculations included regular, "unintelligent" cars being on the road simultaneously. Imagine if the cars were BOTH intelligent and hybrid-electric. Gains could reach 50%! Fully working technology already exists to put this into cars and roads today but concerns about safety prevent it from being deployed.

Safety is a problem? I am not so sure if people driving is any safer than a computer driving, remember Knight Rider...that seemed to work well enough. Frankly, I can't imagine it'll be long before cars are better drivers than we are. And I'm looking forward to it.

Via Breitbart.com

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Further suggestion
written by Steve Bailey, May 18, 2007

I've bored the missus about this for ages, but imagine if the car's were also networked so that they all knew not necessarily eachothers destination but at least where they were going in the near future. That way the cars could manouvre better. A simple set of rules could also allow the cars to move together. For example, rather than waiting to join a main road, knowledge of where each car was on that road and the relative speeds would allow the car to adjust its speed to join the road at the correct time to avoid stopping at all. The same could be said for traffic lights: if they broadcast the amount of time until they went green the car could adjust speed to arrive at the lights when they are green. A further development of this is to completely eradicate traffic signals as the cars could, again, manouvre around eachother without stopping. Of course, for this to work, all cars would have to be intelligent. In the UK we have an advert for an insurance company called Zurich which has a similar theme. Finally, due to the increased intellgence and, lets face it, safety, cars could run almost bumper to bumper at high speeds, reducing congestion in built-up areas. A best-case scenario but that's what I'd like to see.

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written by rob, May 19, 2007

Computers would need to be a lot better than they currently are, for this to work on a large unregulated scale.
They simply wouldn't be able to react to an unusual situation, outside of their programming.

Ideally you would need to make roads car only areas, no pedestrians, cyclists, horses etc. This takes away lots of unknown factors.

But would you want to live in a society so regulated, that you had to follow strict rules that curtailed your freedom of movement, I wouldn't.

Perhaps in a hundred years, when computers might possibly have been developed with a KITT level of AI, it might be feasible.

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