The glitz around the development of autonomous vehicles has obscured what is a more near-term automotive safety innovation, one that will have a much bigger impact on the aftermarket: connected cars.
Mohamad Talas, the leader of the New York City connected vehicle demonstration pilot, which just received a phase 2, $20-million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), says. "Autonomous vehicles are not around the corner in New York City." But connected vehicles are.
New York City is one of three demonstration sites just awarded phase 2 connected vehicle pilot demonstration grants from the DOT. The other two are Tampa, Fla., and the state of Wyoming. A major role in all three pilots will be played by aftermarket safety devices (ASDs) which allow autos to communicate with each other and with roadside infrastructure.
The New York City deployment of ASDs will far outnumber anything that has been done before, including the DOT's Safety Pilot in Ann Arbor, Mich. That’s where 300 vehicles have been tested with ASDs and another 2,400 with vehicle awareness devices (VADs), which have no driver interface and cannot receive basic safety messages (BSMs), so are less valuable in terms of preventing accidents. Tampa, for example, will deploy 1,500 ASDs.
New York City and the other two sites will be testing ASD technology both inside and outside a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) template. There will be 250 intersections in Manhattan and Brooklyn where roadside equipment will be installed. But the ASDs will have significant safety benefits outside the V2I infrastructure.
"Wherever two vehicles with ASDs are, they can send safety signals, detect each other and send safety messages," Talas explains.
Moreover, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications technology used for connected vehicles will enhance the capabilities of autonomous vehicles. John Estrada, CEO of eTrans Systems, says, "To get the full advantage of autonomous vehicles we want them to be able to communicate with one another."
A number of vendors such as Cohda, Delphi, Denso and Savari already produce ASDs for various pilot programs and will undoubtedly be competing for larger scale deployment business in New York City, Wyoming and Tampa. Some experts believe that the ASDs are close to being ready for manufacture and sale in the aftermarket.
Debby Bezzina, senior program manager, University of Michigan's Transport Research Institute, believes the technology is ready now and will hopefully be available in the aftermarket in the next few years. Bezzina is intimately involved in the DOT's Safety Pilot in Ann Arbor.
The retail availability of VADs and ASDs will in part depend on the DOT's completion of a V2V rulemaking which will ostensibly require automotive OEMs to install ASDs in all new cars at some date in the future. General Motors has already said it will equip new Cadillac CTS models with some sort of V2V capabilities in model year 2017.
Stephen Novosad, CV Pilot Systems engineering lead, HNTB Corp., points out that one of the drags on aftermarket deployment is questions about ASD data security and privacy. Novosad is working on the Tampa pilot.
"We have challenges to overcome with security credential management systems," he says. Version 1 was used in the Safety Pilot in Ann Arbor. Version 2 is being developed by the Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership (CAMP) and is expected to be used in the phase 2 pilots. CAMP is composed of representatives from the major auto manufacturers.
Impediments to the hacking of ASD data will undoubtedly be addressed by the eagerly-awaited National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) proposed rule on V2V communication, which will center on radio spectrum and safety messaging. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx pledged in 2014 to propose what he said would be Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 150 before President Obama leaves office.
Any proposed rule will be subject to public comment, and undoubtedly some controversy. But once finalized, it will in effect open the floodgates for commercialization and sales of both ASDs and VADs.
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