
Move: The innovations reshaping how we get around
Driverless Vehicles Will Talk to Us
Envisioning a not-so-distant future where our cars can detect our locations, our to-do lists, and our heart rates.
When we switched from landlines to smartphones about 10 years ago, there was a fundamental shift in how we understood communication technology. Until that point, we’d been using phones pretty much the same way for over 100 years—we got faster lines and wireless handsets along the way, but the basic function of the device stayed the same. Then smartphones came along, and they altered everything we knew about and expected from telecommunication.
A similar shift is about to happen with cars. Vehicles are faster and more eco-friendly than when they were first invented, but they’ve been consistent in functionality: They’ve always been gas-powered boxes operated by a human steering a wheel. With autonomous vehicles on the horizon, though, we can expect our relationship with cars—and our cars’ relationship to the world—to change, and soon.
It’s hard to say for sure exactly what those changes will look like before autonomous vehicles are even on the market. But a good deal of discussion surrounds the capabilities that will allow a car to communicate with its surroundings—how it will talk to other cars (also known as vehicle-to-vehicle communication, or V2V) and how it will talk to the objects it passes and the roads it rides on (vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, or V2I).
In the new era of automotives, how will driverless cars talk to us? How will they talk to each other? How will they talk to the world around them?