Audi tech aims to help hit green lights
Audi released new technology in February that allows drivers to ride a wave of green lights by telling them what speed they should travel to avoid having to come to a stop. Green Light Optimized Speed Advisory, or GLOSA, is Audi’s newest smart-tech innovation, designed to reduce stress for drivers stuck in traffic. It works by receiving traffic light information through the infrastructure’s built-in 4G LTE hot-spot to give drivers a suggested speed to travel to avoid catching red lights. The traffic light tells the car how many seconds are left until the light turns red, and the car uses this information to figure out how fast it must travel to catch the light, allowing the driver to ride a so-called “green wave.”
The technology has just made its way to the company’s cars, but its origins go back to 2016, when Audi debuted its V2I technology in Las Vegas. The tech allows the vehicle to talk to certain parts of city infrastructure.
Since then, 4,700 intersections across more than a dozen cities have been recognized by the system. GLOSA hopes to be part of the new trend toward an integrated city, where all cars and infrastructure “talk” to each other. While the technology is interesting, we can also see it going very wrong. It’s possible there will be a few incidents of Audi drivers looking at their dashboard and speeding up instead of looking at the car in front, and crashing into them.