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Comment by Qz | Hacker News Reader

A better way to communicate between cars -- honking a horn seems kind of stone age at this point.

Stone age technology is still good technology if it does the job well. In the USA / Canada, people seem to get angered / offended when someone honks at them, and similarly people often honk out of anger.

Having phone numbers on license plates comes to mind... so you can call people and tell them to get out of the way =)

Things work slightly differently in India: most of the time you tap lightly to tell people that you're bigger, faster, and approaching from behind, and that it is safer for them to change lanes and let you pass =)

I noticed this in the Middle East too. The horn is used just to announce your presence so they know to look out for you. It's an interesting cultural quirk. It was also common to flash your lights when you're changing lanes on the highway to pass someone, which is considered rude in the US as well.

I often wish I had a huge LED board on top of my car, so I could send messages to other drivers: * "Your allowed to drive 120km/h here, your doing 95!" * "The right lane is free you know!" (replace with left lane in rhd countries ;) )

etc...

Here's one:

http://shopledauthority.com/items/automotive-led-displays/li...

I'd like to have the same for my bicycle, y/telling something like "you're supposed to give me 1 meter, not 30 centimeters".

I agree. I'm actually doing research right now on creating an ad-hoc network out of all the cars on the road, with the ability to flood in certain directions to notify of impending dangers, such as sudden braking up ahead (possibly a crash). 93% of car accidents are attributed to human error, so I think communication is definitely key.

Waze are doing something similar to that.

This is interesting, what sort of thing did you have in mind?

I think a horn is more about communicating between drivers, not cars, and seems like an good solution for this.. In the "hey, im here!" sense, rather than "hey, fuck you buddy!". It provides an alert and rough location that doesn't require much processing by the driver.

Here are some things that I've wanted to communicate to other drivers:

"You might want to check the air pressure in your right rear tire, it's riding dangerously low"

"Your left turn signal's been on for three miles"

"Your gas cap is off"

"The speed limit in this section of road is 45mph"

"Your coffee mug is on the rear bumper"

etc.

Flashing headlights is a common indicator where I live for alerting someone to any of these problems.

Yeah but then someone flashes their lights at me out of the blue and my thought is 'Oh, s*, what did I do wrong? What is wrong with the car? Is there a speed trap ahead?' etc etc until I can stop and check things out...and it turns out that they just accidentally bumped their brights lever. Kind of the equivalent of grunting instead of talking. Would be nice if there were some standard tone set for different common signals.

Directional speakers could be cool for this purpose. Like the ones used in theme parks where only people in the spotlight can hear. Would be nice to say thanks to a polite driver as if they were next to you. But sadly this could be abused. Examples left up to reader.

That's exactly my problem with the car horn. You can honk at someone for any number of reasons, and it can be very hard to tell why someone is honking at you, or if you're even the person they're honking at to begin with.

But at the same time, any new method can't be too complicated, as it would just be an additional distraction and encourage worse driving.

Then again, people are already operating GPS and talking on cell phones while driving, so if something could be designed to be only marginally more complicated than a car horn, but substantially less complicated than a GPS, I think it would be a fantastic improvement.

Some car manufacturers have released technology which allows a car to see when you are getting too close to a car in front of you, adjusting your speed accordingly.

I imagine that using this technology along with local area networks you could improve on the existing technology to enable coordinated lanes. I think it could be incredibly interesting if you were able to have a lane on highways which only allowed linked cars to enter - they are each communicating to each other; establishing the speed of cars, as a group, instead of individually.

As I understand it, traffic delays frequently occur because of the ripple effect of one driver slowing down. If ther was a way to coordinate all cars accordingly, I presume that speeds could actually be increased significantly.

I read that Simulations show only 20% of cars need to have automated radar speed control to help make freeways free-flowing.

You just need to sprinkle smart cars liberally and everyone benefits.

what about a massive foam finger?

I like it! Something that tells me exactly when it's ok to pull out would remove stress from my day and improve traffic flow.

Enabling abuse probably isn't wise while driving a car.

Yes, although I think enabling subtler degrees of 'body language' should be the goal. Anything more conscious risks distracting the drivers.

i was always in favor of having the thing that squirts liquid on to your windshield inverted out. supersoak rather then honk!

You mean like a CB? Why not make those standard?

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