The best backseat driver is coming soon

When it comes to technology, I’m a very late adopter. If technology was an orphan, I’d be welcoming it home just in time to send it off to college. For instance, I kept my 1985 15- inch Goldstar television with its dual UHF and VHF dial changers until 2011, when the picture slowly sunk into the horizontal hold like the final curtain slowly descending on a Broadway flop. Even my neighbor who is the set dresser on the retro show “Mad Men” didn’t want it. Holding on to an antique is cool. Holding on to outmoded technology. Price…less.

It’s not that I don’t like new—after all, I work on a show about innovation. And there’s always an exception to the rule. For me it’s vehicle-to-vehicle technology, or V2V. It’s going to be such a big exception that I’m going to have it installed the minute it’s available.

What convinced me? Being a back seat driver.

V2V technology is a wi-fi type system that will allow every vehicle on the road to “talk” to each other. How it works is kind of like a series of Venn diagram on steroids. Circles of radio waves carry information about the vehicle’s location, speed and predicted path.

It then sends and receives information 10 times per second with every V2V vehicle as far away as a quarter of a mile. Sort of shouting stuff like: “Hey, I’m going at 45mph and you’re doing 75, you’re gonna slam right into me!” Or, “My driver is still miffed about the parking ticket he just got and he’s not paying attention to the fact that you’re making a left right into him!” Okay, not really that existential, but the system will crunch the info and issue a warning if a dangerous situation is about to occur. Warning about a vehicle in your blind spot, or if it’s too dangerous to pass a slower car, or if there’s a car about to blast through a red light at an intersection and smack into you, or if there’s a car at a dead stop five cars ahead of you.

This isn’t like driverless cars—the driver always has control with V2V. It’s just a warning system. So, if you really have a death wish, you can ignore the warning. The U.S. Department of Transportation figures that when fully deployed V2V could avoid 80 percent of all collisions that don’t involve impaired drivers.

Although there are plenty of “active” safety systems in luxury cars—cameras, radars and lasers that not only warn drivers of impending doom but sometimes get the car to take evasive action such as swerving and braking—those are expensive and limited in scope. The radio waves from V2V can “see” around obstacles like corners and bushes and big trucks. And they have a 360-degree view and much longer range than current systems. Plus V2V is cheaper.

All the major car manufacturers are on the same wavelength—literally. They have to be. It’s like the air traffic control system. It wouldn’t work if my Camry was speaking Latvian and your Chevy was yakking in Peruvian. What will differ is how each manufacturer alerts the driver. Our contributor Shini Somara took a ride in two V2V vehicles. The first one was the demonstration van being used at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. It lets out an ear piercing sound, and an icon appears in the rear view mirror indicating what the danger is.

Shini also took a ride in a GM prototype. It issued a verbal warning—as well as an icon and a one-word description on a screen below the dashboard. Shini said that was too hard to see. But she did focus on a line of about a dozen flashing amber (caution) and red WARNING!!! lights that appeared as a highly visible reflection on the windshield.

Alas, this car wasn’t outfitted with my favorite system. It’s called the “haptic” system, and it vibrates the seat when there’s danger. I might be more apt to live a riskier life if I knew I’d be getting little tushie massage whenever there was danger.

It will likely be several years before V2V becomes is mandatory in all new cars, but start-ups are already working on after-market V2V systems to put in older cars. The best guess is those will cost between $100 and $200. Count me in with my 2003 Lunar Mist Camry.

Here’s what sold me: Being a back seat driver. I can’t help it. I’m a total control freak. The other day I was driving with my dad. We were behind a gigantic silo of a truck. But from the passenger’s side I could see that a few cars ahead of us traffic was at a dead stop. I let him know. He never would have seen it, and we would have been slamming on the brakes in no time flat. He slowed down and came to a smooth stop.

But I didn’t stop there:

“Dad, car on the left! ”

“Dad, look out for that pothole.”

“Dad, you’re doing 20 over the speed limit.

“DAD, THE LIGHT’S TURNING RED!”

Maybe I was a having a little anticipatory anxiety. Perhaps if we had V2V the alerts would be more appropriate to the circumstances. His driving was fine. But he was coming pretty close to disowning me. Until I said, “Dad! Sale at the sporting goods store!” Wonder if they can add an alert for that?