Ask HN: How would you reinvent telematics systems for cars? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you reinvent telematics systems for cars?

2 pointscars4fun10 comments

Google Wave attempts to answer the question of what e-mail would look like if it were invented today.

Given that I work in R&D at a major car manufacturer, I've asked myself the same question of in-car telematics systems. We now have things in the car like speech recognition, image recognition, GPS, and Internet connectivity. Yet virtually the only thing I use in the car on a daily basis is AM/FM radio.

What are some of your ideas (while keeping safety in mind) for seamlessly connecting the driver and passengers with these cool new technologies that are available today?

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What is really needed is to have all vehicles, roads, lights, and stop signs linked together.

For example, a car should refuse to let the driver proceed thru a light/stop sign unless it's clear. Imagine all the money that would be saved from property/medical damages.

Many times I wish the below mentioned, but perhaps it will take quite a few decades to achieve it.

If we could have a global infrastructure, wherein we tell the car the place we wish to visit, which causes the car to automatically figure out: the optimal route based on constantly changing traffic and weather conditions, refilling, obeying all rules such as one-way / speed limitations and so on, it will be truly amazing achievement.

The technology is there, fragmented in thousands of pieces; it needs to be weaved as a cohesive whole in a reliable and safe manner.

In a nutshell, save the time for driving the vehicles for an entire civilization, :)

This is definitely in the works. The biggest problem is convincing the countless local authorities to upgrade their existing traffic systems to support a technology that's not in the market yet.

You would have to be smarter about it than wait for local gov. Vision systems that can read street signs. etc. OCR on street signs should be pretty easy since they use High contrast simple fonts.

OCR doesn't solve the problem of blind corners. In fact, even the current preemptive braking systems depend on radar, which perform poorly around corners.

Who said anything about blind corners? I would think it cool if like my GPS system my car knew the speed limit(and reading street signs in combination with storage would allow it to be correct, up to date and cover more roads than my rinky dink GPS system). sure it wouldn't know the speed limit the moment I turned a corner if it just relied on ocr but it might catch a speed limit sign I missed.

Right now all the telematics stuff is broken in to pieces you could do a lot of neat stuff if they were better integrated. You could use that preemptive braking stuff to decide I am in traffic on an interstate an find a new route.(Hint if the speed limit is sixty and I am with in a few feet of the guy in front of me and my current speed is below 5mph I am in traffic and the gps system should reroute me.)

Don't know how useful or practical this will be, but I noticed anything sitting on my dash is clearly reflected on my windshield. Placing a HUD screen on top of the dash, close to the windshield defroster vents pointing up, flipped horizontally, and focused on infinity can get your current speed/fuel/etc without taking your eyes off the road.

Lexus has this in production: http://lexusenthusiast.com/2009/01/20/lexus-2010-rx-heads-up...

How about just opening up the documentation necessary to service or modify the mechanical and microprocessor-based systems in my car and then putting that into a kindle-like device? I'd much rather have something that would help me diagnose, maintain and modify my vehicle then something like a GPS. I'd also want to subscribe to service that would keep this documentation up to date.

Traffic situation. I live out in the sticks so I don't know about recent construction in the city & 'burbs. The result is that often when I go into the city, I get stuck in traffic that I would have known to avoid if I were still living there.

GPS that would display streets with level of congestion would be excellent.

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