With traffic lights being a system put into place in the good ol’ days of horse and carriage, we are finally looking at an update. Audi has developed a new automotive technology that will predict the change in traffic lights so you won’t have too.
The Audi update is based on ‘V to I’ technology, meaning a vehicle to infrastructure communication will take place. This allows the vehicle to communicate with the cities traffic operation system in order to provide a count down of when the lights will change.
It is hard to feel like the death of traffic will be of a morbid funeral, with it’s ancient queuing system of stopping, waiting, waiting some more and then finally getting granted a 5 second gap of green light to move a metre in line. Especially with a generation obsessed with smart phones, you still aren’t guaranteed the person in front of you will move when the light turns green *prick*.
The new Audi technology is said to lessen the stress of driving and is the first step in the direction of implementing a ‘slot based’ system similar to air traffic. This is where the cars will not only communicate with the infrastructure but the cars around it— say you gave the signal to turn left, your car will then give you a specific time slot to allow you to drive straight through.
Before we are able to do away with traffic lights all together, it will need to be a global change in every vehicle and not all of us can afford a shmick as Audi. Yet this could very well be the beginning of the end to traffic.
