A countdown clock silently ticks down to 0:00 in the
Audi A4’s instrument cluster display, almost like the timer on an oven. Except
instead of a baked casserole, the A4’s timer ends just as the traffic light in
front of us turns from red to green.
This is no coincidence; the Audi has received this
information from the traffic light itself. It’s one of the first cars available
to consumers that can have a conversation with the outside world. And it’s a
major leap forward.
Flick the A4’s turn signal and the system senses that you’re
headed toward a protected left turn, where it starts counting down to when the
signal’s arrow will change from red to green.
With this newfound time, which can admittedly add up in
congested Las Vegas, Audi hopes its drivers will relax instead of impatiently
tapping their fingers on the steering wheel.
At first glance, a countdown in the A4’s gauges seems of
dubious value. After all, how impatient or distracted are we that we need to be
told exactly when a traffic light is going to change? But this trick is no
gimmick. Audi’s Traffic Light Information system, as the automaker calls it,
represents the very first time a vehicle has communicated directly with a
city’s infrastructure.
It’s yet another mile marker on the road to fully
self-driving cars, the kind that will allow drivers to sit back and relax while
reading a book while their vehicle motors along on a pre-determined route.
Several 2017 model year Audis—the brand’s A4, A4 Allroad,
Q7, and Q5, with other models set to follow—can be fitted with this ability to
talk to traffic lights via a 4G LTE cellular connection. It’s all part of the
automaker’s Audi Connect suite of programs that utilizes the AT&T network
for a number of connectivity features like making the vehicle a WiFi
hotspot, sending news stories to the infotainment system, and displaying
high-resolution Google Earth maps in the instrument cluster. Audi includes a
Connect subscription for six months on so-equipped vehicles (about 80 percent
of its 2017 A4 lineup). After that, it’s $30 per month for the plan that
includes Traffic Light Information.
Behind the scenes
The hurdle, at least for now, isn’t the vehicles themselves
or the relatively modest monthly charge for the full Audi Connect tech suite.
It’s the infrastructure. Currently, the only connected city is Las Vegas, where
tourists in taxis and pay-by-the-minute Lamborghinis cruising the Strip have no
idea just what data is flying past them. This oasis in the desert has the most
sophisticated vehicle infrastructure in the world.
All this data is transmitted to an innocuous beige building
on a quiet corner a few miles from the strip. It’s in here that the Regional
Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada operates a central traffic command
center that, on the surface, looks just like what you’d find in any other major
metro area. It’s a room full of screens, computers, desks, and, on
our early December visit, a Christmas tree eerily wrapped in festive Nevada
State Patrol crime scene tape.
From this nerve center, workers monitor about 1,100 of the
metro area’s intersections and they’re connected to over 500 video cameras.
Unlike other traffic command centers, Southern Nevada’s lives up to its name;
it’s a partnership between the entire region’s towns and cities and its reach
extends to the state’s borders with California, Arizona, and Utah. This
consolidation means that our A4 can drive around the entire Las Vegas
area predicting when traffic lights will change.
In addition to its partnership in Nevada, Audi says that
it’s working with other cities, but the automaker concedes that it faces an
uphill battle since most cities and suburbs handle things independently with
little cooperation. Additionally, the Las Vegas area has invested heavily in
smart road tech; the region believes that solving future congestion
issues will depend more on improving traffic flow than on simply building more
roads.
Frankly, they’re right. Adding lanes to reduce congestion is
an exercise in futility, highway planners have discovered. Studies indicate
that more lanes simply encourage more driving, which doesn’t fix anything.
Cities beyond Las Vegas are in the process of removing freeways—something that
highway departments in Milwaukee and Portland, Oregon, have already done.
Instead, new roads are increasingly set to rely on “connected”
technology that will allow the pavement itself, in addition to the stop lights
in Las Vegas harnessed by Audi, to communicate directly with vehicles to alert
them to changing road conditions.
This level of vehicle to infrastructure communication is, of
course, in its infancy. On our Las Vegas drive, the Audi occasionally ignored
some traffic lights and for others the system was off by a few seconds. To
discourage drivers from simply stepping on the gas instead of looking up to
confirm that the light has changed, Audi has the counter disappear after it
reaches four seconds remaining; those last few seconds are up to the driver.
But look beyond that beta-feeling clunkiness and it’s not
hard to imagine a future where vehicles will automatically slow down, come to a
halt, and turn off their engines at traffic lights before starting up again on
their own.
source: http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1107662_first-ever-audi-vehicle-to-infrastructure-feature-tested
by Andrew Ganz
http://www.boscheuropean.com
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