I recently learned of a rather interesting pilot study undertaken by Nissan together with the Contra Costa Transportation Authority and UC Berkeley that leverages the automaker’s partially automated driving system, ProPilot Assist, to ease traffic congestion. The idea is called “Cooperative Congestion Management,” which works by letting a car in traffic inform vehicles behind it.
Researchers from Nissan’s advanced technology center in Silicon Valley have trialed CCM on I-680 in the Bay Area, logging about 600 miles. Starting with Nissan vehicles equipped with ProPilot Assist, which combines adaptive cruise control and lane keeping, they added the ability for those cars to communicate with each other, informing other cars about their speed and any hazards. On the road, they were able to show that the system reduced hard-braking events by 85 percent and cut time stationary in traffic by 70 percent.
But we’re not talking about platooning—the idea of having road trains of autonomously driven semi trucks networked together and driving in convoy was all the rage a decade ago, but mostly fell from favor once people realized the human truck drivers were needed for more than just the steering, accelerating, and braking bits of the job.
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