FutureWorld: No DRIVING? (no Audi content)

[Jim Griffin <JGriff@pobox.com>]

Sorry for the BW, but thought all might find this interesting.

I hope that I'll never see the day when they take the fun out of driving!!

Ugh!! I hate being a passenger now; I can only imagine being one on the
"DRIVER'S side"!!

 ORLANDO, Fla (Reuter) - Imagine driving down the  
highway at 100 mph in pouring rain, 12 feet 
 behind the car in front -- and your hands off the 
steering wheel. 
	 You chat with friends in the back seat while a dashboard  
computer steers, avoids obstacles in the road and determines how 
best to reach your destination. 
	 This is the way we will be driving in the 21st century,  
according to transportation industry and government officials 
who gathered in Orlando this week at the Third Annual World 
Congress on Intelligent Transportation. 
	 High technology will make highways safer and more efficient,  
officials said. 
	 ``This is the future and a much more strategic way of  
generating more efficiency out of a current system that you have 
in place,'' U.S. Transportation Secretary Federico Pena said in 
a speech Friday. 
	 ``Americans lose two billion hours per year to gridlock.  
Congestion costs our economy $48 billion a year. We have 
six-and-a-half million car crashes every year,'' Pena said. 
And officials say the next decade we will see a 50 percent 
increase in traffic. 
	 ``If we could warn drivers that they're too close to cars,  
and brakes could be automatically applied ... if we could warn 
drivers they're going too fast for a curve ahead ... and if 
drivers could detect cars in blind spots when they're changing 
lanes,'' Pena said. ``...if we put in those three 
crash-avoidance technologies, our initial analysis indicates 
that we could prevent 17 percent of all crashes. That's one 
million crashes every year.'' 
	 Some of the technology discussed, such as fully automated  
vehicles in which the driver is little more than a passenger, 
may be years from becoming a common sight on the road. 
	 But an infrastructure leading the evolution towards an  
intelligent transportation system is now underway. 
	 Research by Carnegie Mellon University has been used in  
military and consumer vehicles, said Celeste Speier, spokeswoman 
for the National Automated Highway Consortium. The federally 
mandated group links nine public and private bodies researching 
and developing a national plan. 
	 Many collision-avoidance devices have been tested and are  
close to being on the market, Speier said. ``That means if a 
drunk driver veers out of a lane, the steering wheel will 
automatically nudge the driver back into place.'' 
	 Another consortium member, the University of California at  
Berkeley, has done tests with collision-avoidance devices, 
navigation sensors and platoons of vehicles linked by magnetic 
fields or radar which will eventually travel in close 
proximity at high speeds, making traffic flow more efficient, 
Speier said. 
	 Initially, this technology might be applied to convoys of  
trucks or buses, said Christine Johnson, director of the 
intelligent transportation program at the U.S. Department of 
Transportation. 
	 It will take years to phase the concepts into the general  
population similar to the way computers took over for 
typewriters, and CDs took over from vinyl record albums. 
	 ``We'll start with cars that will remain passive and merely  
warn the driver through a voice prompt that he's falling 
asleep,'' said Dean Pomerleau, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon 
University. 
	 ``That in turn will evolve into a self-steering car which  
will evolve into a controlled speed car into a fully automated 
car'' that would navigate on a high-tech intelligent highway. 
	 Officials also have yet to work out whether most computer  
intelligence should be built into cars, which is the most 
popular theory, or whether roadways should carry most of the 
data needed to control the flow of traffic, Johnson said. 
  	   	
                             Jim Griffin
                      JGriff@pobox.com
                        Maryland, USA
"Perception is often stronger than reality!"
                               '92 100S
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