First vehicles from Toyota that will have the ability to communicate with each other will be released in the US starting 2021. By 2025, most of Toyota and Lexus vehicles will feature Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC). Starting 2015, the carmaker has equipped with this system around 100,000 cars in Japan.
Toyota pointed toward its automatic emergency braking systems from 2015 as proof of intent. Now 92 percent of Toyota’s US sales are cars containing its Toyota Safety Sense or Lexus Safety Sense braking technology. Toyota is a little bit late on the announcement though. Volkswagen said that its communicative cars will hit the road by 2019. The idea of a net of cars that will be able to communicate with each other is something that’s been around for some time now, the government offering the auto industry a block of spectrum in the 5.9 GHz band specifically for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) systems back in 1999.
The idea is to fill the roads with V2V and vehicle-to-infrastructure(V2I) cars to hopefully reduce collisions and traffic bottlenecks. However, we are still away from that. Three years ago, legislation to make V2V systems standard equipment was announced, but that still hasn’t happened.
