Why don't cars have a way to contact nearby cars like fictional spaceships do?
I was watching this video of a live chicken trapped on a moving truck and thought it was strange that it's not possible to say anything to them even when circumstances might warrant it. All we got is honking and waving. There could be a touchscreen interface with a map of nearby vehicles. It could be voice controllable or the passenger could do it for safety.
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I keep a CB radio in my car, and have a few friends with them
It is actually really handy when you're road tripping together in different cars to be able to just grab the mic and say something to the other vehicle when you need to stop for a bathroom break or you're having an issue with your car or want to give them a heads-up about whatever.
If you're fairly close together a set of cheap FRS walkie-talkies from Walmart does the job just as well. Probably worth stepping up to CB if you expect to lose sight of the other vehicle though, range is usually a bit better.
It's especially handy if, like me, you go camping and such in rural areas with unreliable cell coverage.
You do occasionally also get helpful heads-ups from truckers if you're listening to channel 19 about road conditions, police activity, traffic, etc. but mostly it's just idiots babbling about conspiracy theories and immature bullshit.
Why is everyone so quick to recommend Walmart? Corpo advertising shouldn't have a place on lemmy , intentional or not
Because they're fucking everywhere, something like 90% of the US population lives within 10 miles of one.
It's basically shorthand for "this is a common and readily available thing that you can acquire anywhere in the country for cheap even if megacorps have driven all of the local specialty retailers out of business in your areas"
As opposed to something like a HF ham radio which is a specialty item that no big retailers like walmart, to the best of my knowledge, carry, and so you're probably not going to be able to find it locally.
But I can buy that thing on eBay for 3X more plus shipping!
I get that it's short hand for that --but I still don't think it's good to push people forward to stores with so many moral and economic issues like walmart as the first suggestion.
A simple trucker's radio is a common item in gas stations and truck stops--not that they're necessarily better than walmart, but they're just as common and weren't put forth as a suggestion
A "truckers" (CB) radio is exactly what I was suggesting FRS radios as an alternative to.
I suggested them because they are much simpler to use. With a mobile base station you need to figure out where to mount it in your car, where to mount an antenna, tune that antenna, how to hard-wire it into your car's power (or splice an adapter onto it to power it from the cigarette lighter), whereas with a walkie talkie you just need to turn it on, put it on the right channel and push a button.
(Handheld CBs do exist. I've very rarely seen them for sale in a brick and mortar store)
Believe it or not. Shopping at unethical companies is unethical . I don't like people advertising for a terrible corp. Especially a fascist corp.
As evil as Walmart is it's undeniable they do have everything you could think of under one roof. The idea isn't awful if it wasn't so harmful.
Well, not always. Mine apparently doesn't have any vanilla extract right now. I can only assume that it's tariff related
Name another place to buy a radio besides amazon
Would've looked a lot better if you commented that when I hadn't already
GMRS has mostly replaced CB now. Cheap and works better than CB at short range. Adoption has been slow, however.
CB radio? That shit is for truckers and nerds but it was solid.
Use it all the time (UHF). But only get comms on other off-roaders, all the trucks, or caravamers. It's very useful. I give out handhelds to friends if we're travelling together.Honestly, phones are pretty shit in comparison.
I'm glad it's not popular for other drivers, though. One of the main benefits is most people don't use it, so the bands don't get clogged with shit.
Seconded on their usefulness on the road. Incredibly easy to just reach over, hold the PTT button and get your message across. One time purchase for something that won't get shut down or unsupported ever.
If you try communicating with a phone, the only safe way to do it (assuming one person per vehicle) is to start a phone call before leaving, and keep it running constantly. If you have a passenger, they become your secretary. If the call drops then that's all comms lost until both pull over and redial. Requires mobile coverage everywhere on your route which in Australia isn't the case, even on major routes like A1 Bruce Highway.
Walkie talkies are king for travelling with mates
Road rage.
I think the inability to communicate makes road rage worse, actually. Simple matters that could be solved by a quick comment become rage inducing because there's literally nothing you can do about them.
I think you are severely overestimating the average maturity of humans, especially when they feel powerful as they do when driving.
They feel empowered, partially, because they're basically anonymous. Everyone is basically a faceless tank on the road.
Exactly this. I've long had a thought that if all automobiles were like the Invisible Boatmobile from SpongeBob, then most of the suble cues between humans would make it easier to understand intentions, with corresponding reduction in misapprehension and collisions.
That said, humans simply are poorly adapted to traveling at 100 kph, so who's to say if these cues are even understandable at high speed. And of course, it's downright impossible to see those details when blinded by mutual headlights on a rural highway at night.
This guy gets it.
"sir they're hailing us!"
"Thanks wife, put them through."
"HEY FUCKER YOU DIDNT SIGNAL"
* my bad hand wave *
Yeah, let's add proximity chat to traffic. It'll be great!
Here in South Korea every car has the phone number of the owner displayed through the windshield so you can always call them when they parked false or so.
Really? That seems like it could be an issue of privacy.
I mean I can only imagine that people might be harassed in some way or another.
It’s not used for harassment because strong social norms discourage it. You would lose face if you'd do it.
Bruh that's just multiplayer game voice chat IRL. Imagine chaos and trolling.
And you get to hear their music peaking out whatever microphone is used for the car to car communication
That sounds awful. But it does exist, its called a cb radio
Yeah my friend has a cb radio and he says when traffic is bad people are just yelling at each other. Although that's anonymous, if the messages showed you were X person from C vehicle it would probably be a bit more civil
This is what CB Radios are, and many more people used to have them before cell phones.
People in mountainous areas where a cell phone is useless still do.
It's called a CB radio. Enjoy.
If I can't say "on screen" first then I don't want it
You can just remember to say "Over" over.
::: spoiler Is the communications holofilter ready? Engage the overlay. Put them on screen.
:::
Yeah no people are trash on average, I don't want to get constantly pinged by trashy people while driving, I don't even like proximity chat in games, imagine having that in real life, there's a high chance of accidents happening due to distraction. Now if someone wants to add a little display on their car that can display some basic text messages, maybe that could be of some use
Hate to break it to you, but proximity chat is enabled in real life all the time.
People don't have the balls to come up to you in real life and say the stuff they say from a place of saftey and anonymity.
Just look at the stuff people say on Lemmy, to someone they will never even meet, ever.
Why do we even leave comments here. Just total strangers. And yet people care very much about what others say.
That's ridiculous! I will find you and flay your children alive! :D
Many people would use such a method to troll and be disruptive, possibly causing collisions
BRETTS_NISSAN has just sent you an unsolicited dick pic
Yeah just like every online videogame with strangers. I would immediately mute it and never unmute.
Lady honked at me the other day for not turning left at a light (she obviously didn’t see the motorcyclists) and began making rude gestures.
Well anyway it’s probably better that we can’t talk to each other.
I had a similar thing happen this week. Left turn lane waiting for pedestrian and their dog to cross the road. Person behind me was losing their minds at me. I pointed at the pedestrian and shrugged.
I once had someone flip me off because I put my turn signal on. We were in the right lane, I was turning right, and the left lane was completely empty.
Guess we’re supposed to mow them down, idk.
We do...?
It's called a CB radio. Though usually it's only semi-trucks and enthusiasts that use 'em. It would be pretty awesome if they were just a standard feature, tho.
Extept in very rural areas there are far too many people around for it to be useful. Unless somehow we can enforce strict rules on what you are allowed to say.
It's not a bad idea, but there are plenty of countries where it would be abused to xbox live chat levels.
The radios would need to have a very, very short range to avoid this. You'd need to know that everyone who can hear you can also see you (and potentially follow you if they'd like a word face to face), which is the accountability aspect that's missing from online interactions.
I absolutely would not want an open channel to everyone around me. The potential for abuse is too high.
Imagine the giant trucks road raging because you’re in the left lane and only going +20 the speed limit. Or the old creeps hitting on teenagers.
And then there’s the privacy concerns. In order to connect to your car-specifically- it has to know your car is there. Which means your car is constantly putting out a beacon. This would be similar to how cell phones work - and are now being used by merchants and advertisers like Walmart to track where you go in stores.
And then there’s the security concerns of people pushing malware.
And then there’s the question of distractions from having to respond to people reaching out or shutting them up or whatever.
What if we instead imagine the truck drivers politely asking you to move over? What if the ability to communicate freely with other drivers made the experience closer to walking in a crowd. I'm imagining something that allows all vehicles within a certain radius to hear one another so you can communicate with courtesy. I think a lot of road rage stems from our frustrations with our inability to communicate (and be held accountable) by the people around us.
Yeah. No. I don't know where you are, but when someone is angry at the inconvenience of having to slow down to merely reckless speeds... they're not going to be capable of civil discourse. If they were capable of civility... they wouldn't have been angry in the first place.
In a dense crowd, the information being exchanged amongst the crowd is enormous. It is a constant negotiation, of different parties trying to get somewhere but also trying (hopefully) to respect other people's space. And the stakes are lower, because bumping into someone is fine at 1 kph but totally unacceptable at 50 kph. And humans are dynamically adjustable, like raising ones arms so that a stroller can pass more easily. Cars can't really do that (except Transformers: Robots In Disguise).
In a crowded bazaar, the bandwidth from reading people's facial cues, from seeing whether they're distracted by goods on display or from their Instagram posts, plus what people actually say -- and what they don't say -- and how quickly or slowly they walk. All of that is context that is necessary to participate in the activity of passing through the crowd, and I think that cost-optimized technology to exchange the same amount of info while also needing to react 50x faster and deterministically, with safety standards suitable for 2-tonne machines that already kill and maim thousands per year, that's not really feasible.
What lane you're in has nothing to do with the speed limit. If you're the slower traffic, keep right. Always keep right unless you're overtaking.
I will return to right lane as soon as I finish overtaking and it is safe for me to do so.
But keep the fucking safe distance while I do so. If you slow down a few meters behind me, instead of few centimeters, it won't delay you much.
"What lane your in has nothing to do with speed limit.... keep right... "
Left lane.
And your advice is actually somewhat incorrect, depending on the context your in. In more rural areas, sure. In more urban areas... there are dozens of reasons why you need to keep left- including taking a left exit.
Or, you know, like how at that speed your usually passing everyone else...
And just for the record, I don't know where you are, but here... +20 is considered a felony. it's incredibly stupid to drive that fast on a highway.... never mind not on a highway.
people that go +20 and faster? They're putting everyone's lives at risk and statistically it's only a matter of time before they kill someone. Hopefully something happens to teach them why it's fucking stupid before it goes that far.
There is a highway near me where the limit is 55, but the average speed in the fast lanes is 70+.
I don't get it. This makes everyone a criminal. I isn't realize that 75+ would be a felony.
IIRC, the felony reckless driving was lowered from +30 to +20, during Covid after it became clear how dangerous people were driving. We saw a massive spike in roadway deaths because suddenly people felt like they could do whatever.
Congratulations. Now they're breaking the law and you're breaking the law. And now you're both causing unsafe driving conditions for others. And you're causing traffic.
Follow the algorithm to make things safer, consistent, and predictable. It's not your job to police others' speed.
Wow.
I don’t care what “the algorithm “ says, and you’re a hypocritical asshole for telling me not to tell others how to drive while telling me how to drive.
Now to be completely clear: I will always drive in a manner I deem to be safe. Not you. Not the asshole tailgating me because he can’t be bothered to to leave 10 minutes earlier.
And I can assure you: driving 50mph in a residential area is not “safe”. And neither is 90 in a 70 during rush hour. These are both staggeringly dangerous and imo, people who do so are on the level of those who drive drunk.
I'm not sure what I said to elicit such hate, and I don't know what state or country you're in. In California this is the law, and it's at least as important as the speed limit. But unfortunately, it is never enforced. Slower traffic keep right
Being called out for a hypocrisy is not hate.
You were literally telling me not to tell be how to drive (which, while I came close, I didn’t actually do,) while literally telling me how to drive.
I understand many states have some form of “slower traffic laws”… and explained why that’s not relevant.
There are many reasons why someone needs to be in the left lane- taking a left-exit, or the left hand fork in a split, or, you know, actually passing people themselves…. Or seeing an eratic driver behind them making it dangerous to get over.
I have to assume that CA law also says something about running people off the road because they’re not going fast enough for you. Generally, I assume everywhere does- for obvious reasons.
Even if you’re right, that doesn’t give you them right to drive recklessly and tailgate people. Which brings me back to the original point I was making: the kind of people who are angry at having to slow down… are unlikely to be polite and civil- they’re already demonstrating harassing behaviors.
I never said you shouldn't tell people how to drive. I implied you shouldn't physically force others to drive how you want. Note I also never said it's ok to speed. Anyway, have a good night. I'll try to enjoy being stuck in traffic caused by you.
I think you two live in different counties and actually agree.
Honking IS how you contact nearby vehicles.
CB Radio was big in the 70's.
it must have been super fun. I wish the world was based on magnets again
I heard it's not completely dead, just mostly. Be the change you want to see!
They do. Some people poat their radio frequency their car.
You could publish you phone number right on your car. See how it goes.
Have you seen the movie Serenity? When they're out in Reaver space, remember the radio chatter?
That's what it would sound like.
CB radio still exists.
I used to have a cat that loved to jump up under any truck that would be delivering something. We used to tell them not to leave until we had eyes on our cat. Even with that, he was such a varmint that I'd give them my business card, and tell them that if they got to their next delivery, and found him in their truck, to call me, and I'll come get him.
Luckily, our precautions worked, but he was a troublemaker.
Dude, people can't handle the complexity of simply driving the vehicle as it is. Bad things happen when adding handling dynamic communications into the mix with people who aren't trained to the level of combat pilots. That's why we don't let people juggle a cell phone while driving.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
One day I was driving on a highway at roughly 80km/h (no idea how much is it in miles per hour, we use metric around here), and there was a car almost glued to the back of the car I was driving, totally ignoring the "following/tracking distance" thing we're used to learn during driving school (the faster the vehicles, the farther they should be from one another, so if the vehicle ahead needs to do a sudden break, the vehicle behind have the time to react and break as well with no collisions). The car I was driving has a quite sensitive break light: a gentle push is enough for the breaking light to light up without actuating the breaking system (not ABS, it's an old car), so I had a quite unusual idea: Morse coding "DISTANCE" to the driver in the car behind through the breaking lights, using extremely gently pushes on the breaking pedal while I kept driving. I'm not sure if the driver could understand Morse, but at least I tried.
And that's a problem for your scenario where "nearby cars" were to contact each other: even though they could listen to each other, could they actually understand each other?
Divide kmh by two and round toethe nearest 5/10 is close enough to mph for discussion purposes. It is off at times, but for discussion purposes it is close enough that your impression of how they drive is the same. (90 vs 100 kmh - not enough to matter in discussion - it matters in court so don't try this in the real world)
Or we can stick to kph for discussion purposes, since that's what most of the world uses
Sigh... Everyone is used to what they have used all their life and refuse to learn anything else...
Is there a reason why people on the metric system have a need to be learning imperials? (I know 1 mile = 1.6 km, but that's another matter)
What does anything matter. If you deal with someone else at least one of you needs to learn the others systems. You and your neighbor probably speak the same language so it is easy, but the more differences the more there is to learn. You can choose to not deal with people in the US who only know US systems, or you can work with them by learning. I have no idea what your motivations are, but whatever they are they becomes your reasons to do or not do something.
I do a lot of water sports in the UK and we use VHF radios. Certain frequencies are used by marinas and the like, and nearby boats will be tuned into them. Then there is a frequency used for emergency calls - the coastguard listens on that and answers, and will move your call to another frequency for more details, leaving the mayday one open again.
We mainly use VHF for boat-to-boat comms, or boat-to-shore. The local range is decent - a few miles from our base, depending on atmospheric conditions, obstacles etc. I honestly have no idea if you could use VHF radios between cars though. It's not private for a start - everyone can hear you - and once someone is yammering on the marina frequency no-one else can transmit. So it's just brief messages with protocols.
A touch screen interface in a car is a TERRIBLE idea. Yeah a passenger could do it but only if there is a passenger in the car in the first place.
Maybe a manual dial to cycle through the available nearby vehicles then. The idea is just that there should be a way for it to be clear who you are contacting and where their vehicle is on the road relative to yours.
In the eighties when cell phones started being installed in cars, some people posted their phone numbers on their back or side window. That didn't last long.
This might shock you but I dont want nearby people to be able to talk to me. Chicken or not.
You describe contacting the people in nearby cars.
That's something different than contacting nearby cars.
The latter is developed currently by the car industry. The former has been mentioned: CB radio.
But in both cases: maybe they are not interested in listening to you ;-)
I just want a way to save the chicken :(
As a thought experiment, I'm prepared to momentarily set aside the practical and societal issues to see whether a mechanism for motorists to communicate to any other nearby motorists would have a use.
To set some ground rules, I think it's fair to assert that such a communication mechanism is not meant for lollygagging, but would be used for some sort of operational reason that is related to driving a motor vehicle. So the use-cases would be broader than just safety or traffic management, and could include coordination between drivers all heading to the same place. This criteria means we won't require the generality of a mobile phone network (which can call anyone) and instead is very local.
Some examples that might use this mechanism:
This selection of examples represent exigent circumstances that arise while driving, rather than something which could have been planned/coordinated in advance. More over, they cover scenarios that are one-to-many or one-to-one, as well as unilateral messages or bilateral conversations.
We need to also consider what existing cues already exist between motorists, some of which are quite dated:
Before we even check if these existing cues can be used for the examples above, we can see there are already a fair amount of them. The problem with cues, though, is that they might not be universally understood (eg a motorist from flat Nebraska might not understand the hazard lights on a slow-going truck climbing up Tejon Pass heading in/out of Los Angeles). Moreso, some cues are downright dangerous in certain circumstances, such as waving a motorist into an intersection but neither could see the oncoming fire truck that strikes them.
Notice that for all these cues, only fairly simply messages can be conveyed, and for anything more complicated, it is necessary to "turn the invisible crank", meaning that you and them need to roll down your windows and talk directly about what the complex situation is. So if a situation is simple, then it's likely one of the existing cues will work. But if not, then maybe our new car-to-car system might turn out to be useful. Let's find out.
Scenario 1 is partially addressed by one very long honk or using hazard lights, depending on if the hazard is avoidable or if the hazard requires all traffic to halt. If it is about a small object in the road, then perhaps no message is needed at all, since we assume all motorists are paying attention to the road. If the hazard is a hidden one -- such as behind a curve or it's black-ice -- then only hazard lights would help, but it might not be clear to following motorists what the issue is. They would only know to remain alert.
A broadcast system could be effective, but only to a point: motorists cannot spend more than a sentence or maybe even a few words to understand some situation that may only be seconds away. We know this from how roadway signs are written: terse and unambiguous. So if a broadcast system did exist for hazards, then it must be something which can be described in fewer than maybe 5 words. This means the system isn't useful for info about which parking lots at LAX have room, for example.
Scenario 2 involves a hazard that is moving, and can be addressed by honking and high-beams to get the motorist's attention. There is no ability to convey the precise nature of the hazard, but outside of nighttime environments where people may be hesitant to stop just because someone is trying to tell them something on a rural Interstate, this generally is enough to prevent a roadway calamity.
But supposing we did want to use our new system to send that motorist a message, the same concern from earlier must be respected: it is improper to flood a motorist with too much info when the driving task doesn't really allow for much time to do anything else. An apt comparison would be to air transport pilots, where a jetliner at cruising altitude actually does have a lot of spare time, but not when preparing for takeoff or landing. Driving an automobile is a continual task, and for the time when a car is stopped at a traffic light, then there is virtually no need for a car-to-car communication system; just yell. The need for ACARS for automobiles [pun intended] is looking less useful, so far.
Scenario 3 is similar to Scenario 2, but is a one-to-many message. But given how such exchanges tend to also become multilateral ("can you get me a Big Mac as well?" and "well, we don't have to be at the camp site until 4:20"), this once again starts to become a distraction from the driving task.
Scenario 4 is probably the most unique, because it rarely happens: motorists always have the option of stopping, although stopping can itself create a hazard if the location is not great (eg left lane on an American freeway). It would be truly unusual for two cars to have struck something AND then need to quickly decide if they can press on toward the nearest exit (eg minor body damage) or if they must stop immediately (eg a fuel rupture that starts a small fire beneath the vehicle) AND there is someone else who can mutually exchange info about the damage.
It's such a contrived scenario, because I actually made it up, based on the similar situation that occurs for aircraft that suffer damage while in the air. In such situations, the pilot would need external support, which can come from a nearby aircraft, or ATC, or an escort fighter jet. For example, if an aircraft cannot confirm safe extension of the landing gear, diagnosing the problem is helped by a nearby news helicopter confirming that the landing gear is clearly visible and locked.
Alternatively, if a departing aircraft has struck a piece of metal dropped by an earlier Continental Airlines DC-10, and that bit of metal causes the left tire to explode, further causing a fuel rupture from the left tank and an uncontrollable fire slowly destroying the wing, it would be very useful if ATC can tell the pilots ASAP before the aircraft is going too fast to abort the takeoff, resulting in an inability to remain fly and an eventual crash into a hotel.
I bring up my contrived automobile Scenario 4 because it shows how things could always be slightly different if a small factor was simply changed, if maybe there were better warnings to the pilots from their aircraft, or if the Continental plane was better maintained, or if Charles de Gaulle ATC was just a little bit faster to radio to the pilots. So it's perfectly natural to think that by having this one aspect of the driving experience changed, maybe there's a lot of value we could get from it. Indeed, the Swiss Cheese Model of accident causation tells us that any one layer could have been different and thus stop the holes from lining up.
But from this thought experiment, we can see that the existing cues between motorists already serve the most common reasons for needing to communicate while on the road. And anything more complicated messages than "I would like to pass" become a distraction and thus less useful and more dangerous in practice. Aviation knows full-well the dangers of introducing a fix which ends up causing more problems in the long-run.
I will add one more: a quick once-or-twice blink of the hazard lights indicates "thank you" if someone lets you merge in front of them, etc.
This seems analogous to the video game "Killing Floor", albeit with much lower stakes. This game is an FPS, and playing it requires your attention. Voice chat exists, similar to CB radio in cars, but many people opt out, to avoid the distraction.
The game has a "quick chat" feature which cannot be disabled, which allows for messages like "follow me," "get out of here", "medic", "thank you" and a few others.
Perhaps a quick chat system for cars would be an improvent over the ambiguous "hazard lights / high beams / honk" messages which can be misunderstood. I think we've all had the experience of wondering, "why were they flashing their lights at me, or were they just going over a bump in the road?"
Although the first concern would be to limit their potential for abuse / distraction.
Possible messages:
This is actually being worked on. Researchers are looking at adding a 4th light to stop lights. When enough “smart” cars get into the area they will talk to each other and the stop light to help control the flow of traffic. The 4th light is to tell you that is happening. When the cars leave the area, the turns off, and the light goes back to normal control mechanisms.
fictional spaceships have advanced sensors,manuverability, and subspace communication. cars dont have that capability.
Also fictional spaceships tend to have a whole crew instead of 1-5 people.
The horn and a middle finger are already well entrenched as communication tools.
The quality is quite poor, but I'm reasonably sure that being able to talk
toat people sounds worse.Having said that, the idea of CB radio is cool.
AFAIK, freight trucks/lorries can contact each other, through radio. But imagine how much worse road rage would be if you could shit-talk other drivers over radio. Would be funny, though.
I am the night riderrrrrr!!!!!!
You can contact other drivers. Just curl your fingers and thumb together and do the wanker gesture at them.
You have seen unfiltered general chat on an mmo?
And now that at freeway speeds?
No thank you.
Beep beep!