Here’s the latest part of Suzuki’s ‘connected’ vehicles plan – where motorcycles and other vehicles talk to each other in real time as they move along a road network.
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Basically this latest design development is centered around a group of motorcycles travelling together. This is significantly different to previous plans which focused on live information being broadcast from a single motorbike.
The group-ride plan has each motorcycle registering with each other as a group of motorcycles, this group can be made up of any amount of motorbikes. Once the bikes have identified as a group they each get a singular digital footprint which knows where each bike in the group is in relation to both each other and other motorcycles around them in the immediate area.
But here’s the really clever bit, the group of motorcycles will broadcast its position – and the amount of motorcycles in the group – to any other road users. This means that a car driver (or truck driver, bus driver etc) equipped with a compatible system will get an early warning of the group of motorcycles closing in, plus the amount of bikes in the group and then, as they pass, the driver gets a live countdown of the remaining amount of motorbikes to go by.
The patent from Suzuki is not a completely new idea for the inter-vehicle connectivity schemes outlined in various comments from Japanese factories recently – but it is more a tweak on how the tech will be able to help a group of riders be more visible to potentially dozy drivers.
What do you think about this? Any good? Or will it not make a jot of difference to the bored rep in his M3?
