The information screen in a car shows how many seconds are left before the upcoming green traffic light turns red, writes Brian Byrne. Just like the cues that many pedestrian traffic lights offer. It means the driver of the car, like the pedestrians, can make a more informed decision on what to do in the coming seconds.
It's just one of the small elements that make up one of the biggest tests of car-to-car and road-to-car communications so far undertaken in the automotive world.
The test programme is being conducted in Ann Arbor, near Detroit in the US, and involves around 3,000 vehicles being driven by volunteers in the programme, being run by the University of Michigan Transport Institute.
The systems use retrofitted transmitters which constantly broadcast information about the cars they're in to other cars with the same technology.
The researchers are helping to develop automatic warning technologies which will, for instance, warn all vehicles in a line of traffic of sudden braking by one up front, even if it's around a corner and out of sight of the next vehicle.
This is the next level of safety systems, beyond the now-familiar ones such as blind spot monitoring, which provide warnings of potentially dangerous movements of surrounding vehicles which can be 'seen' by radar, camera and laser sensors.
The research programme, begun as a 1-year pilot in 2012, has now been extended to three years and is backed by US Government funds.
