What do you get when you combine packed freeways with the promise of self-drivingcars? A mess, of course, and a technological challenge. One potential solution: a system called platooning that links vehicles in a high-efficiency group, like a train without the train tracks.
The idea has been around for years, but endowing cars with computing and communication smarts means it's moved into real-world testing. Perhaps the best example is a European project called Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) that tucked three autonomously driven Volvo cars into the slipstream behind a truck on real-world roads.
Platooning ultimately could mean that cars whizzing along at 75 miles an hour in a bumper-to-bumper train that dramatically increases the capacity of existing roads, said Richard Wallace, a researcher with the Center for Automotive Research. LINK
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