Big Friend David Pescovitz has written a story of UC Berkeley professor Raja Sengupta’s great proposed use of ever cheaper technologies, GPS and WiFi, enabled by network effects to create much safer automobility.
The GPS enables a vehicle to monitor its own direction, location and velocity. Every 100 milliseconds, that data is transmitted via WiFi to all neighboring cars. Since the system doesn’t use range-finding sensors like radar, it can even gather information about vehicles that may not be in direct line of sight. Essentially, the automobiles are constantly forming ad hoc wireless networks as they pass one another, but instead of accessing Web sites or email, they exchange information about their physical place on the road. Sengupta calls it a “Cooperative Collision Warning System.”
