Ars Tecnica has a pretty cool story about Audi demonstrating Vehicle-to-Infrastucture (V2I) communnication in Las Vegas.
Or, really, Infrastructure-to-Vehicle:
Audi’s new Traffic Light Information feature can be found on 2017 A4s, Q7s, and allroad vehicles that have Audi’s Connect Prime package — which puts customers out $10 to $30 monthly, depending on the length of the subscription.
As an Audi driver, you experience this feature as a small icon that tells you how much time is left until the next green light as you come to a stop. If you come to a protected left turn and put your left blinker on, the car will give you a countdown unique to that light as well.
This is pretty basic V2I, but so far V2I has mostly been talk and no action, so it’s awesome to see Audi pushing this live.
It’s also interesting to me that Audi charges a fee for this. That suggests there aren’t really network effects to this effort, otherwise they’d want as many people on the system as possible, even if Audi had to subsidize it.
David Silver 