My dad just got a new car with a backup camera, and the quietest turn signals you’ve ever heard. In order to prevent people from driving with their blinkers on and increase safety when changing lanes, it would be nice if when the blinkers were on the console screen showed as picture in picture the image from backup camera, so you could see if there where other cars in your blind spot. If they wanted to get real fancy they could add algorithm that could put boxes around cars that might interfere with a safe lane change. This wouldn’t be as good as collision avoidance radar, but a heck of a lot cheaper, and the cars computer is already powerful enough to do this.
As more and more cars get GPS navigation systems, if the privacy issues could be over come it would be helpful if cars could use Bluetooth to talk to each other. Bluetooth’s range is about the error of GPS, so two cars that occupied the same space might want to know about each other, and use other information to correct the error. Think of it like a car based Peer to Peer network. Traffic signals could have transmitters to let the car know that a light was going to change before the car could make it through the light, or that coming intersection was a four way stop.
This could be the way we baby step to cars that can drive themselves.
If this pans out Garmin, Tom-tom, etc become companies to watch.
However, I see the Koreans, the Japanese and the Chinese (when they can sell cars in the States) carmakers leading this movement. Why? Because they can figure out how to get it to home in their home markets and then go overseas.
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