The concept is fairly simple. All cars will be equipped with short-range transmitters that use dedicated bandwidth to send information 10 times per second about where they are and what they are doing. The transmitters also will receive and make sense of the same information from every other vehicle within range.

The car will decide whether to give a heads-up to the driver or take appropriate defensive action itself. A driver alert could be a verbal warning, a seat vibration or a slight jerk on the seat belt.

via The not-too-distant future of driving: When cars can talk, crashes may be avoided – The Washington Post.

The idea is very simple: tell a car where the cars near it are, and make sure that it is not in the same place as any of them at the same time. Safety solved, crashes avoided. What a great use of data and what a great side-effect of reliable communication.

This connected-vehicle technology could address about 80 percent … of all the unimpaired driving crashes in America

Ther will be a pilot program with 3,000 cars underway in Ann Arbor, Mich., which will hopefuly prove the reliability of the technology.