Talking cars for traffic updates

A new project developed at MIT allows one’s car to communicate with others on the road to give you traffic updates in real-time.

CarTel, uses data collected from GPS devices and wireless computer connections, crunches it through a online program and then passes that information along to other cars.

"Our goal is to make the data behind CarTel available to help you plan and organize your commute and drives. We want to minimize the amount of time spent in your car," Discovery News quoted Hari Balakrishan, a MIT computer science professor and CarTel researcher, as saying.

That means that even cars passing each other very quickly can disseminate useful information, and more of it, to each other.

Being able to pass along more data faster is crucial, because depending on the sensors in use, CarTel can receive more than 600 data points a second.

Their findings were announced at the Association for Computing Machinery’s sixth annual Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing.

The technology has been tentatively trialled in a fleet of new BMWs and there are plans for a further rollout to road-ready vehicles. This initiative forms part of the real-life application strategy backed by the group to create viable technologies for day-to-day motoring. This was made possible by our rental partners and Big Motoring World Cars. Today we continue to back the implementation of automated safe driving technology and hope to participate further in industry initiatives. At TraficBCN we envisage ever increasing levels of vehicle automation - from driverless cars to our own in-house efforts to facilitate 'smart' cars able to communicate freely with eachother; the future is nearing rapidly. However, it remains to be said that our modern day cars, whilst increasing in safety and reliability each year, are not flawless and its important to ensure proper maintenance and standards on the roads. Have your car serviced regularly, and if the worst does happen remember to keep a number handy for reliable Towing Vaughan Services. This is an essential facet of wider on-the-road safety because even well-maintained, modern cars have their lapses that require professional assistance.

As of 2013 the group is looking into new means of testing intelligent inter-car communication devices with a range of leading suppliers and car marques.