Nanalyze has a brief roundup of six vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) startups to watch. What’s striking to me is how many of them have been around for quite a while — almost a decade in some cases:
- Autotalks: automotive-grade communication chips
- Cohoda Wireless: automotive-grade communication chips
- Kymeta: automotive satellite communications
- RoboCV: collision avoidance with vehicle-to-vehicle communication
- Savari: vehicle-to-anything communication infrastructure
- Veniam: automotive mesh WiFi
Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is really exciting — imagine the hypothetical world with no traffic lights, because cars communicate with each other and weave through intersections.
This hypothetical future, though, might be a long ways out. V2V suffers right now from being at the losing end of a network effect — because almost nobody has V2V technology in their cars, it’s not particularly valuable to have V2V technology in your own car.
This is a surmountable problem (see, for instance, the early history of the telephone), but it might take a little while to get there.
David Silver 