Communicating cars could save NZ lives - study

Smart technology enabling cars to talk to other vehicles could save hundreds of people being killed or injured on our roads, new research has found. Photo / 123RF

Smart technology enabling cars to talk to other vehicles could save hundreds of people being killed or injured on our roads each year, new research has found.

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems, or C-ITS, allows vehicles to communicate with other vehicles, traffic signals and roadside infrastructure.

They use dedicated short-range wireless systems to share information like vehicle position, direction and speed with other connected vehicles at a rate of 10 times per second.

This meant drivers could be warned about potential dangers around bends or over hills long before they encountered them.

However, the technology hasn't been widely taken up in New Zealand, due to issues with differing vehicle standards and the infrastructure upgrades needed to accommodate it.

A new study led by Australia's Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC), and funded by Austroads, investigated the benefits of the system and other automated driving applications in both countries.

It found that if all light passenger vehicles were fitted with a range of automated driving and connected vehicle safety applications, there could be between 310 and 485 fewer fatal and serious injury crashes in New Zealand, and between 4100 and 6500 fewer in Australia.

Road trauma was one of the highest-ranking public health issues in both countries.

Last year, 328 people were killed on New Zealand roads - our worst road toll since 2011 - and 12,456 were injured.

A horror weekend on the roads lifted this year's death toll to 292 - 40 deaths higher than the same time last year.

In Australia, crashes resulted in almost 1300 people killed and 35,500 hospitalised each year.

According to the report, the full adoption of C-ITS could reduce 35 to 50 per cent of adjacent direction crashes at intersections by warning drivers when there was a high risk of colliding with another vehicle.

Another benefit was the ability to warn drivers of a potential collision with an oncoming vehicle, reducing head-on crashes by up to 40 per cent.

Automated driving applications showed similarly promising projections, decreasing the studied crash types by up to 50 per cent.

The applications involved took over one or more aspects of vehicle control without driver intervention, and could be found in many currently available vehicles.

The researchers believe it could take 25 years for the automated driving and C-ITS applications to fully penetrate the on-road fleet.

"Given the potential significant road trauma benefits, this report underlines the need to continue to invest in supporting physical and digital infrastructure, policy and trials to further understand what our future needs will be," Austroads chief executive Nick Koukoulas said.

"Austroads' member agencies are currently involved in a range of trials to further explore these issues."

The study followed a widely quoted US study that found up to 80 per cent of crashes that didn't involve driver impairment could be avoided.

The Ministry of Transport was following developments in the technology, and had co-funded trials which showed promising results but weren't completed, due to lack of willing participants for the operational phase.

The issue had been complicated by the fact connected vehicles were being built in Europe, US and Japan, all using different standards and modes of communication.

Around half the vehicles entering the New Zealand fleet each year are sold new and are declared to meet European or Australian standards.

Used vehicles made up the rest, and these were usually from Japan and declared to meet Japanese domestic standards.