Automotive Industry Provides Advice to USDOT on Intelligent Vehicle R&D
IVsource.net
16 December 2002

Reflecting their role as a chartered Federal Advisory Committee, ITS America recently sent formal advice to the US government, providing recommendations on research priorities within the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative (IVI) program.  The letter provides very specific and concise recommendations from the automotive industry, to a degree not seen in quite some time.

Reflecting their role as a chartered Federal Advisory Committee, the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) recently sent formal advice to the US Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta, providing recommendations on research priorities within the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative (IVI) program.  The letter provides very specific and concise recommendations from the automotive industry, to a degree of detail not seen in quite some time.

What prompted this advice letter?  ITS America published their “National ITS Program Plan:  A Ten-Year Vision” early this year.  The USDOT's ITS Joint Program Office sought further advice from ITS America on aspects of this plan that impact the automotive industry, for what can be viewed as a “sanity check.”

Questions posed to ITS America by USDOT addressed both the safety goals and the efficiency/productivity goals in the Program Plan.  Specifically:

1. What programs or activities are needed to implement the safety goal?  To help “jump start” the market, the Program Plan recommends that the government purchase a fleet of vehicles equipped with safety enhancing technologies – is this useful and practical?

2. Should DOT start a new program to address Advanced Transportation Automation Systems (Cooperative Vehicle-Highway Automation Systems) in order to achieve ambitious Efficiency and Productivity goals in the Plan?

The process to acquire this automotive industry advice was focused within the IVI Light Vehicles Steering Group, which contains representatives from all the major auto manufacturers selling vehicles in the US.  The LV Steering Group was convened by ITS America for this purpose in May 2002; represented at the meeting were DaimlerChrysler, Ford, GM, Honda, Nissan, and Toyota.  Additionally, an open comment period was provided by ITS America for comments from other interested parties.

The advice was delayed until late this year due to some revision cycles and the need for approval by the ITS America Board of Directors, which occurred at the ITS World Congress in Chicago in October.

Implementing the Safety Goal

The automotive industry recommends that USDOT expand its work on benefits estimation, to include measured benefits from deployed IVI technologies.  USDOT work to date has been limited to projections and paper studies.  Also, there is the desire for the government to sponsor workshops reviewing the lessons learned in ongoing Field Operational Tests of IVI systems.

The automotive industry also suggests that it would be useful to more tightly coordinate the work of the Infrastructure Consortium (IC) and the Automotive Enabling Research (ER) program.  The possibility was raised that current IC work on intersection crashes could take advantage of ER products in the areas of human factors, map databases, and vehicle communications, to develop concept-ready demonstrations for stop sign and signalized intersections, for example.

One particular area of interest is to explore joint government / industry projects in “the utility and business model for probe vehicle data.”  The group recognizes the potential to collect and disseminate information from vehicles to benefit safety, mobility, and fuel economy; however, next steps need to be taken to assess data requirements, benefits, and costs.

Regarding driver workload,  the industry advice calls for the development of distraction metrics that operate while driving, i.e., in the real-world setting.  There is also interest in assessing “driver intent,” which could be used “to systematically adapt driver information displays according to driver needs and capabilities."

USDOT was also advised to continue to encourage the development and testing of standards for collision warning and driver assistance equipment.

Jump Starting the Market

The consensus of the auto manufacturers is that there are benefits to be gained from including active safety system products in government fleets.  This is seen more for the purpose of testing technology than in really jump starting the market in terms of volume sales.

As an endorsement of current IVI activities, the industry group noted that the government can effectively jump start the market by “assisting in the funding of pre-competitive research, field operational tests, and enabling infrastructure to help aid system development and document real-world safety benefits.”

Aggressively Exploring Cooperative Systems

The Ten Year Plan calls for cooperative vehicle-highway systems (CVHS) to be aggressively explored because they are essential to achieving improved traffic flow.  In the advice letter, the auto industry endorses this view – “we need to keep focus on the cooperative elements, such as vehicle-vehicle and vehicle-infrastructure communications, that will serve as building blocks toward a longer term vision of automated or partially automated sytems.”  However, they noted that it is “premature” to initiate a program directly focused on automation systems.

The “Take Away” – IVsource Commentary

Across the board, this industry advice is quite solid and reasonable.  To put it in some perspective, it was more or less expected to see calls for next steps in driver distraction / workload, encouragement in the standards arena, and support for USDOT’s existing activities in enabling research and field operational tests.  Their desire for real-world benefits measurement, moving beyond paper studies, will do much for the credibility of IVI systems (both political and public) if implemented.

The response to the idea of equipping government vehicle fleets can be seen as a “polite” one – the industry sees value, but the scale of government vehicle purchases is not nearly of a size to affect market volumes.

The big news is in seeing strong support for R&D in cooperative vehicle-highway systems throughout the document.  CVHS takes many forms, and several are referenced in the letter:  probe vehicle data collection and dissemination, intersection collision countermeasures, and systems which improve traffic flow.  While support for CVHS R&D can be found throughout the broader ITS industry, and while the automotive industry has voiced general support in the past, this time it sounds like they are “serious” about it – seeing the potential benefits and ready to join forces with the government in addressing both technical and business aspects.

One question remains -- it is clear that the industry sees cooperative systems as a means to enhance safety systems.  However, based on the wording of the advice letter, it is not clear if the industry supports the vision of cooperative systems as a means to achieve traffic flow improvements.  While they specifically note that R&D in vehicle automation (a capability typically focused on traffic flow enhancements)  is premature, there is no discussion of “efficiency” enhancements resulting from partial vehicle control incorporating near/mid term components (such as communications).

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