Inter-vehicle communication will help improve traffic flows in the future by providing direct information about road conditions and thus enabling drivers to anticipate hold-ups.
This vision of the future is borne out by the results of research conducted by Mercedes-Benz within the context of the INVENT (intelligent traffic and user-oriented technology) project sponsored by Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The principle is demonstrated by a fleet of three Mercedes-Benz passenger cars: each vehicle passes on information about its position, speed, lane and direction of travel to following road users. Aboard the receiving vehicles, a computer picks up these individual data and uses them to calculate the traffic situation throughout the entire road sector. This would allow drivers to identify problems such as traffic jams and hold-ups at an early stage and to take the necessary measures to avoid them. And if a vehicle does get caught up in a jam, the system is able to indicate how long it is expected to last.
Tomorrow's driver assistance systems could also make use of the information relayed from vehicle to vehicle; by adjusting the speed and separation distance in accordance with changing conditions, such as repeated stop-and-go sequences, for example, it would be possible for a vehicle to respond automatically to the current traffic situation.