Stupid has a home and that home is in Macomb County, Michigan. It is here, we learn from The Detroit News, that General Motors Co. has decided to test the use of wireless technology in conjunction with roadside QR code signs to transmit vital traffic information to passing cars. Those messages will only be communicated to cars equipped… Read More
Tag: usdot
Fed Panel Asks Today: Why Waymo?
The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) is holding the first meeting today of a new advisory committee focused, in its own words: “on automation across a number of modes.” The committee, made up of an array of experts from a variety of fields, is “to immediately begin work on some of the most pressing and… Read More
V2V: Loose Talk about Talking Cars
The U.S. Department of Transportation issued a proposed rule this week which may ultimately require the installation of a communications box in every car manufactured or sold as new in the U.S. The U.S. is alone in the world in pursuing such a mandate and the proposal, which requires years of additional evaluation, testing and definition… Read More
The Privacy Delusion
Why do we think we have privacy in our cars? Why does the government believe there is an interest in preserving privacy in cars? Can we just get over it? One of the least private places known to mankind – outside of the Internet – is the car!
But our transportation regulators in the U.S. and their counterparts at the European Commission… Read More
Time for U.S. Fatality Reduction Targets
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a blog implicating the insurance industry in the high level of highway fatalities in the U.S. As part of that blog (“The Insurance Industry Has Blood on Its Hands”) I suggested that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ought to look into developing a fatality-reduction… Read More
Carol Burnett and Automotive Safety
American television viewers of a certain age will remember the Carol Burnett Show and its star, Carol Burnett, and her customary ear tug at the end of each show. TV Guide tells us the “ear tug first made famous during the 1967-79 run of CBS’s Carol Burnett Show was a message to her grandmother, a way of saying, “Hello,… Read More
Automotive Deaths and Big Data
Nothing focuses peoples’ attention quite as effectively as death and there’s been a lot of it on U.S. highways lately. Preliminary figures released this week by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reveal that for the first nine months of 2015 traffic fatalities increased 9.3%.… Read More
2015’s Unfinished Automotive Business
The farther we come, the farther we have to go. While progress in advancing personal transportation was made in 2015, the year closes with glaring elements of unfinished business threatening to impede further progress toward mitigating highway fatalities and reducing emissions and congestion. These areas of unfinished business… Read More