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NEWS
Cars to talk to bikes
Integrating motorcycles into Germany's giant simTD project will make roads much safer for riders, says BMWBMW has expanded Germany’s simTD inter-vehicle communications pilot project in a move likely to dramatically improve road safety for motorcyclists.
The “Safe Intelligent Mobility – Testfield Germany” (simTD) project already takes in almost all the country’s auto industry in the largest and most complex vehicle communications field trials program yet devised.
Starting earlier this year, it entails four years of real-world field trials of a raft of so-called “car-to-X” (C2X) communication technologies.
C2X is a necessarily broad-ranging term, covering as it does a network of vehicles connected both directly and via central comms and traffic management systems. The project will see a multitude of competing alternative technologies put the test in each tranche.
In the latest part, BMW will roll out a small fleet of motorcycles equipped with its BMW ConnectedRide system in the central state of Hessen, which takes in the city of Frankfurt.
All told, the company will furnish the Hessen project with 20 BMW cars and five motorcycles. They form part of a 120-strong fleet provided by the country’s big marques – Daimler, Volkswagen Group, Ford and Opel.
In its statement, the company describes its BMW Motorrad ConnectedRide as the “two-wheeled equivalent” of its ConnectedDrive C2X package, tweaked to focus on the needs of motorcyclists.
With bikes so much less visible than cars and riders so much more vulnerable to accident and injury than four-wheeled motorists, “integrating motorcycles into the system of reciprocal networking… is an especially important aspect of Car-to-X communication.”
Key to the project, therefore, is its potential use in developing C2X-based rider assistance systems, giving bikers prior warning of adverse weather conditions, slippery road surfaces, accidents and other hazards or changed traffic conditions ahead. C2X processes location data fed in from individual in-car systems into information for drivers.
Depending on the depth to which the system is integrated into vehicles, it can draw data from countless sources. BMW cites examples as small as switching on foglights or turning up wipers – a mass of drivers doing such things in a specific locale is an accurate pointer to a change in weather conditions for those approaching the area.
Importantly, it can also be extended to warn car and truck drivers of motorcyclists in their vicinity, giving riders a new kind of visibility and dramatically reducing perhaps the most serious hazard they face on the road.
simTD is the strongest recognition yet of the profound importance of C2X in the transport systems of the future. The technology’s potential reach and effect is staggering, extending from minor driver assist systems to fully autonomous, server-controlled vehicle operation.
Its eventual effects could extend to traffic management systems capable of evening out peak-hour flows and even a major rethinking of vehicle design.
Alongside with the state of Hessen, simTD has drawn funding from Germany’s Federal Ministries of Economics & Technology, Education & Research, and Transport, Building & Urban Development.
Also taking part are academic institutions, energy and telecoms carriers and a host of affiliated component makers like Bosch and tyre maker Continental.
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Written byJeremy Bass
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