NextWala

Chrysler Plans In-Car Web Access This Year

The Washington Post reports that Chrysler will be the first company to provide in-car Internet access toward the end of 2008. 

Interesting comment from menno at The Truth About Cars:

"Great, now we will have drivers (and I used the term in the loosest possible way)

-drinking coffee (starbucks or mcdonalds, makes no difference)
-texting
-talking on their cell phones
-eating
-yelling at the kids in the back seat
-and now on the frickin’ web."

With BMW (ConnectedDrive) as well as various Personal Navigation Device (PND) vendors (such as Dash Navigation) coming out with web-connected services, this trend is unstoppable. It is now in the hands of drivers as well as vendors of these devices/services to use/provide these services in a safe manner.  Is audio the only way to be completely safe and can a display-based system ever be fully safe?  Ford's Sync product has taken an audio-centric approach (http://www.syncmyride.com/).

Traffic jams recreated

Interesting experiment to recreate traffic jams.  Seems like the human factor can never be taken out of this problem!   Now we know why these random traffic jams happen.  Turns out these human behavioral elements can be normalized out of most traffic information services.

Some quotes from the New Scientist article:

"They asked drivers to cruise steadily at 30 kilometres per hour, and at first the traffic moved freely. But small fluctuations soon appeared in distances between cars, breaking down the free flow, until finally a cluster of several vehicles was forced to stop completely for a moment."

"The shockwave jam travelled backwards through the ring of vehicles at roughly 20 km/h, which is the same as the speed of the shockwave jams observed on roads in real life, says lead researcher Yuki Sugiyama, a physicist in the department of complex systems at Nagoya University."

Thanks to Jonathon Ramsey at Autoblog for finding this.