Greater auto safety vs. faster Wi-Fi

Cars that wirelessly talk to one another are finally ready for the road, creating the potential to dramatically reduce traffic deaths, improve the safety of selfdriving cars and, perhaps, someday help solve traffic jams, automakers and government officials say.

But there’s a big catch. The cable television and high-tech industries want to take away a large share of the radio airwaves the government dedicated for transportation in 1999 and use it instead for super-fast Wi-Fi service. Auto industry officials are fighting to hang on to as much of the spectrum as they can, saying they expect that they will need it all for the new vehicle-to-vehicle communications, or V2V.

The government and the auto industry have spent more than a decade and more than $1 billion researching and testing V2V technology.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to propose as early as next month that new cars and trucks come equipped with it. General Motors Co. isn’t waiting for the proposal, saying it will include V2V in Cadillac CTS sedans before the end of the year.

The fight pits two government agencies against each other: the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates spectrum and sympathizes with wireless proponents, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which regulates auto safety and has long made V2V a top priority.

The White House, which is reviewing the traffic safety administration’s proposal to require the technology in new cars, is caught between two of its goals: greater auto safety and faster wireless service.

With V2V, cars and trucks wirelessly transmit their locations, speed, direction and other information 10 times per second. That lets cars detect when another vehicle is about to run a red light, is braking hard or is coming around a blind turn in time for the driver or, in the case of self-driving cars, for the vehicle itself to take action to prevent a crash.

The government estimates V2V eventually could prevent or mitigate more than 80% of collisions that don’t involve a driver impaired by drugs or alcohol.