We’re not quite at the flying car yet but there are advances in technology that are making driving safer for every one.

Have you seen the commercial where a car comes to a stop narrowly avoiding a collision even though the driver was distracted? This is a real technology. It is called Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication, or V2V. V2V works by using wireless signals to send information back and forth between cars about their location, speed and direction. The information is then communicated to the cars around it in order to provide information on how to keep the vehicles safe distances from each other. At MIT, engineers are working on V2V algorithms that calculate information from cars to determine what the best evasive measure should be if another car started coming into its own projected path. A study put out by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2010 says that V2V has the potential to reduce 79 percent of target vehicle crashes on the road.

Now they are working on Vehicle-To-Infrastructure, or V2I. V2I would allow vehicles to communicate with things like road signs or traffic signals and provide information to the vehicle about safety issues. V2I could also request traffic information from a traffic management system and access the best possible routes. Reports by the NHTSA say that incorporating V2I into vehicles, along with V2V systems, would reduce all target vehicle crashes by 81 percent.

Remember KIT from Nightrider, the most amazing self driving car. Well we aren’t quite there yet but there is the Google self driving car. Google’s cars not only record images of the road, but their computerized maps view road signs, find alternative routes and see traffic lights before they’re even visible to a person. By using lasers, radars and cameras, the cars can analyze and process information about their surroundings faster than a human can. If self-driving cars do make it to mass production, we might have a little more time on our hands. Americans spend an average of 100 hours sitting in traffic every year. Cars that drive themselves would most likely have the option to engage in platooning, where multiple cars drive very close to each and act as one unit. Some people believe platooning would decrease highway accidents because the cars would be communicating and reacting to each other simultaneously, without the on-going distractions that drivers face. Although self-driving cars may seem far off, GM has already done its own testing and some people believe that you’ll see some sort of self-driving car in showrooms in the next decade.

Stay tuned to this blog spot for more future car technologies, resistance is futile!