Shulman 1 VEHICLE SAFETY COMMUNICATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

In the United States, passenger vehicle manufacturers have been working together, along with the U. S. government, to study wireless communications for vehicle safety applications. From 2002-4, seven automotive manufacturers— BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, GM, Nissan, Toyota, and VW— worked with the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) to evaluate vehicle safety applications enabled or enhanced by communications. This project determined initial communication requirements for identified applications, performed some Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) vehicle testing and helped develop the DSRC standards to support the requirements of safety applications. The project identified eight scenarios as high-priority for further research based on their estimated potential safety benefits. Of these eight application scenarios, four involved vehicle-to-vehicle (V-V) communications and four involved communications between vehicles and the infrastructure. Three of the vehicle-infrastructure communication applications involved intersections. From 2005-6, BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, GM, Nissan and Toyota worked together to develop and evaluate the Emergency Electronic Brake Light application (EEBL) as the first vehicle-to-vehicle cooperative active safety application in order to: o Develop concepts of operation, system and communication requirements o Establish a common V-V EEBL message set and demonstrate interoperability o Perform common engineering tests o Report to the industry on results o Guide future V-V safety applications development In 2006, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, GM, Honda and Toyota initiated two major vehicle safety communications projects with the USDOT. The first project is developing and field testing a Cooperative Intersection Collision Avoidance System using infrastructure-to-vehicle communications to address intersection crashes that result from signal Violations (CICAS-V). The second project, Vehicle Safety Communications Applications (VSC-A), is developing a common vehicle safety communication architecture, protocols and messaging framework necessary to achieve interoperability among different vehicle manufacturers' applications and an analysis of potential benefits versus market penetration for vehicle safety communications applications.