There has been a lot of chatter recently about vehicle to vehicle or V2V communication, which would allow your vehicle to communicate with vehicles on the road and vice versa. This technology could be useful in preventing accidents by allowing drivers to know when the person in front of them is braking, or if there is a stalled vehicle on the road. A new kind of technology is in the works now. Vehicle to Infrastructure may be appearing in a car near you.

Vehicle to Infrastructure or V2I as it is known, is expected to be in vehicles very soon. This technology allows your vehicle to communicate with roadway infrastructure wirelessly by exchanging safety and operational data with one another. Who would have thought… Your car can talk to the road? This seems like the technology you may see in a sci-fi thriller, but no it’s real.

So what could this technology potentially entail? V2I would allow roads to notify drivers of potholes in the road that may be coming up, which in turn, could allow drivers to avoid them and avoid potential damage to their vehicles. It could also alert drivers to icy road conditions, or even construction zones that are up ahead on the roadway.

Some safety associations like NHTSA believe that this type of technology along with V2V communications could reduce the risk of accidents on the roadways by up to 80%. The implementation of V2V and V2I communications are one step closer to allowing self driving vehicles onto our roadways and infrastructures as well. This will help build the way for those vehicles to be able to interact with our vehicles as they drive with each other.

The Senator of Michigan has already introduced a bill called the Vehicle to Infrastructure Safety Technology Investment Flexibility Act of 2015. This will allow federal dollars to be spent adding the V2I technology to new roads that states build. The bill was unanimously passed by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and will likely be part of the highway bill that will be voted on in the next few months.