Skip to main content

US to field trial connected vehicle technology

The US Department of Transportation (DOT) has announced that the University of Michigan will conduct a road safety field trial in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which will include the installation of wireless devices in up to 3,000 vehicles in one location, to evaluate the effectiveness of connected vehicle technology to prevent crashes.
April 17, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
RSSThe 324 US Department of Transportation (DOT) has announced that the University of Michigan will conduct a road safety field trial in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which will include the installation of wireless devices in up to 3,000 vehicles in one location, to evaluate the effectiveness of connected vehicle technology to prevent crashes.

During the pilot, to be carried out on the streets and highways of Ann Arbor from August, 2012 to August, 2013, drivers will be alerted to impending dangers in real-time so they can take action to avoid crashes. Data will be collected from the vehicles in order to understand how different types of motorists respond to safety messages in the real world.

"This test will be an important step towards the US Department of Transportation's top priority – a safer transportation system," said Peter Appel, administrator of the 321 Research and Innovative Technology Administration. "Technology is an investment in the future and this pilot deployment of vehicles that 'see' and 'talk' with one another with the help of wireless communication will allow us to learn how drivers use electronic alerts to avoid crashes in a real-world environment."

The safety pilot is the second part of a two-part connected vehicle research initiative. The first part is the Safety Pilot Driver Acceptance Clinics, which began on this month. The driver clinics are the first step in identifying how motorists respond to innovative wireless devices for safety. Participants in the six driver acceptance clinics will test cars equipped with connected vehicle devices in a controlled environment where researchers can observe the drivers' responses to the technology.

To continue the data collection under real-world conditions, the Ann Arbor safety pilot will allow drivers using cars, trucks, and transit vehicles fitted with wireless devices to carry out their normal routines while their vehicles sense the presence of other equipped vehicles nearby.

Related Content

  • April 7, 2014
    America fires V2V starting gun
    Leo McCloskey, ITS America’s senior vice president for Technical Programs, talks to Jason Barnes about what the recent NHTSA ruling on light vehicle connectivity means for cooperative infrastructures in North America. In early February the US Department of Transportation’s (USDOT’s) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced it had decided to start taking steps to enable Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication technology for light vehicles. In so doing, the many safety-related applicati
  • January 24, 2012
    Frequency changes threaten vehicle safety applications
    The use of frequency spectrum at 5.9GHz for vehicle safety applications is at risk because of two draft bills currently before Congress. Here, we look at why and what’s being done to address the issue. In the US, the right of cooperative infrastructure to use frequency at 5.9GHz is under threat as a result of the proposal of two bills in Congress. The chronology of spectrum allocation for Dedicated Short- Range Communications (DSRC)-based Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) safety a
  • January 31, 2012
    Intersection collision avoidance system trial
    Although much of the emphasis of research into intersection management has tended to concentrate on the needs of urban locations, there remain specific issues pertaining to rural intersections which need to be addressed. Here, Rebecca Szymkowski and Greg Helgeson, Wisconsin DOT, Todd Szymkowski, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Craig Shankwitz and Arvind Menon, University of Minnesota detail progress on an intersection collision avoidance system for more remote locations.
  • February 1, 2012
    Gearing up for IntelliDrive cooperative traffic management
    Beginning in the first quarter of 2010 it became evident that the IntelliDrivesm programme direction had been reestablished, by the USDOT's ITS Joint Program Office (JPO), after being adrift for a few years. The programme was now moving toward a deployment future and with a much broader stakeholder involvement than it had exhibited previously. By today not only is it evident that the programme was reestablished with a renewed emphasis on deployment, it is also apparent that it is moving along at a faster pa