The Intersection Of The Future Is Here

"Red Light!" The Ford Flex yelled at me as I pushed it toward the intersection of Village and Military Streets, right in the heart of the Ford Research and Engineering complex in Dearborn, MI. I was deliberately charging the light to see how the car, equipped with a Smart Intersection receiver, would react. I got the verbal assault, got the point, and did my best imitation of a panic stop. The intersection of the future is here, and it talks to cars that know how to listen. My Flex listened up good, getting the yellow light timing information that warned of an imminent red, and my lane position from the adaptive GPS. Kind of scary in a big brother way, but pretty damn cool when you think about it. The off-the-shelf GPS systems used by this technology may pave the way to self-updating navi systems, and the infrastructure-to-car Wi-Fi will make for serious mobile networking. More details after the jump.

I was driving the Flex during a demo of an up-and-coming new technology that’s being tested as part of the global move to active safety. The Smart Intersection is one of the ways Ford envisions this playing out. Rather than relying on complex camera and laser systems, SI uses Wi-Fi-type signal transmission called DSRC (dedicated short range communication) to communicate intersection details: GPS location with 1 meter precision, a map of the intersection that the GPS can position you on, and what color the light is and when it will change next.

The car side of the system is clearly not a market-ready thing at this time, but it offered some good clues as to what will likely make it into future vehicles. The warnings are given by an LED bar at the base of the windshield and a female voice. The LED bar mimics a brake light on the car in front of you and is a lot more effective than it sounds. The female voice brings to mind the self-destruct sequences from old sci-fi movies: imperative, but oddly soothing.

Using a combination of vehicle speed and location, the software calculates the anticipated time to the intersection and warns appropriately. The timing can be adjusted in the software: my Flex was rather conservative in its warnings. I’m guessing Ford doesn’t expect much in reaction times from the journalism crowd. I found this funny in that I tended to jam the brakes on the warning, stopping well ahead of the white line. The local pedestrians were not amused when I charged a few stop signs. Side note: I love the Flex, and holy cow, it has brakes.

Ford’s Joe Stinnet, Product Design Engineer in Active Safety Research and former amateur rallye racer, was quick to point out that at this time there are no plans to take the system further. "It is entirely possible to program the car to stop in these situations, but that would be too much for drivers. The plan is to introduce the system gradually so that drivers can acclimate to it over time."

I prodded Stinnet with one more serious question: what kind of hacks does he anticipate, and how are people going to be able to defeat this technology. He mentioned that SI technology will be closely integrated into SYNC and other networking technologies in the car and it may take some very serious hacking to defeat only the GPS element of it. As far as defeating it goes, the crude way – cutting the antenna wire – will be a poor choice: without it, there will be no networking of any type. I think we will see some pretty creative "solutions" pop up as the technology makes itto market in the future.

I’ll have more entries on Smart Intersections in the next few days, so stay tuned.