Ford Highlights Wireless Road Safety Feature at CES

LAS VEGAS -- Mobile electronics continued its growth trajectory at CES as companies including Delphi, Ford, Audi, Mercedes and Chrysler were on hand demonstrating safety, communications, energy, entertainment and health benefits of connected car technologies.

Ford is among the companies working on DSRC (Dedicated Short-Range Communication), a safety system that allows vehicles to communicate data to other vehicles on the road using the wireless 802.11p standard. Mike Shulman, technical leader of Ford Active Safety Research and Innovation, said the industry is moving from passive safety -- seat belts and airbags that minimize injury to passengers in a crash -- to active safety that prevents the accident from happening by sensing what’s going on outside the vehicle and then warning the driver.

Today, rear cameras show what’s behind a vehicle and lane-change sensors warn if a car is drifting. The future, Shulman said, is the next-gen technology that enables cars to send a short message, 10 times a second, transmitting data including position, speed, acceleration, heading angle and predicted path. If there’s about to be a crash, a driver would receive a warning. Coverage over 802.11p is 360 degrees and about 1,000 feet, Shulman said.

Ford and other car makers have been working with the government to ready DSRC for deployment. A field trial will begin in Ann Arbor, Mich., this year with GM, Ford, Honda, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Nissan, Toyota, Audi, Hyundai and KIA, where drivers will be given DSRC-equipped vehicles to test drive for a year. Field trials begin in August, he said, and the deployment will include trucks, motorcycles and buses, Shulman said. “We're even thinking of putting it in smartphones so if a pedestrian is walking across the road at night in dark clothing, his phone would be sending out a message saying, ‘here’s my position and speed'” so the car could warn the driver with an audible alert and heads-up display.

Depending on results of the trial, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration could issue a regulation requiring all cars to incorporate the technology by Q3 2013, Shulman said. Since the technology is only effective if all cars on the road have it, Ford is developing a system that its dealers could retrofit into existing vehicles, he said. Cars would have to be able to interface with Ford’s internal CAN-bus to be compatible, he said.

Adding 802.11p to existing basic Wi-Fi in a car is a low-cost safety option, compared with forward-looking radar options today that might cost $1,000, Shulman said. “The car already knows its position from GPS and it knows its speed, acceleration and brake status,” he said. Sending out that information becomes “a very low-cost, effective crash-avoidance technology because it’s using stuff we already have” even on mainstream cars such as Ford’s Focus and Fiesta. The tweaked 802.11 protocol enables vehicles to allow vehicles to “send short messages at speed,” without the need for a lot of “handshaking,” he said. The technology uses the Carrier Sense Multiple Access part of 802.11, a peer-to-peer protocol that’s stripped of handshaking functions that would slow down communication, he said.

Ford also showed us a hybrid car technology that takes the gas/electric concept to the next level using the cloud. Today hybrid vehicles switch to gas operation when the electric power runs out, a spokesman for Ford Research and Innovation told us, “but what if we could use software to use electric around my kids’ school or in the state park” to avoid the spread of pollution? Ford’s vision is to have a vehicle use outside technology “to make the car smarter.” He described a hybrid vehicle that can choose -- either based on driver choices or automatic calculations derived from route information provided by the navigation system data -- when to use gas or electric power. Several European cities have “congestion zones” where drivers are charged a fee for entering a crowded area at a particular time, he noted, and in such zones electric power could incur reduced charges. Drivers could also choose to use electric power in areas such as school zones or state parks, and shift to gas power for a highway, he said.

Connectivity with the cloud offers several benefits for vehicles, the spokesman said. One is personalization options much like those for tablets or smartphones. Driving history and preferences can follow a person from vehicle to vehicle whether it’s a new car or a rental, for example, he said. Cloud-based computing enables a vehicle to perform complex calculations externally, eliminating the need for certain computing functionality in the vehicle, which reduces cost, he said. Access to dynamic cloud-based data such as traffic, weather conditions and nearby road construction can help a vehicle determine routes and fuel requirements, he said. “That makes the vehicle itself smarter without involving you as a driver,” he said. The technology is in the prototype stage for demonstration purposes, he said, but concerns such as data privacy and security need to be worked out before the functionality can be implemented, he said. For example, “Who owns the data?” he said.

The 4G and LTE connections today “are pretty good,” the spokesman said. When research began on the connected car, “3G was the big thing,” and “maybe at product launch,” 4 or 5 years down the road, “4G will be history and 5G will be the big thing,” he said. Currently, Ford is connection agnostic, he said, but how cars connect to the cloud still has to be determined. Vehicles today communicate via a user’s smartphone, he noted.