U.S. safety plans likely to boost GPS systems — More Universal GPS Advocacy

I was writing about this universal GPS idea just a few days ago under the PAYD (Pay As You Drive) heading.

Now the US Department of Transportation has released a study that indicates significant benefits in areas many haven’t thought of before for universal, mandatory GPS and telemetry - two-way data communication between vehicles at various data processing or control agencies.

Sounds like big brother and to many it will be seen that way, but money is the eventual deciding factor in these sort of ideas. If the government were to try to implement voluntary GPS tracking today it would never fly .. only a very small percentage of the driving and car-buying public would go for it. But your tireless correspondent here is old enough to remember when seat belts were first introduced in the USA. They were optional equipment, hardly anyone bought them and anyone with a short future view would have given them little chance to really succeed. A little ink applied to a rider on an appropriations bill or two, however and today no one can hardly remember the days before “Click it or ticket”.

What isn’t apparent to the casual observer is the fact that many of the “big brother” type data is already being collected by cars. Air bag sensors record your speed continuously. If there’s a wreck and the airbags deploy interested law enforcement or research agencies can determine you actual speed before the accident. Numerous other sensors and on board computers are logging and counting up all sorts of data s you cruise along in blissful ‘privacy’.

There are about three factors today that keep the ACLU and other activist groups from going bananas over these arguably invasions of privacy.

First, these “black boxes” on today’s cars and trucks are all designed and built by separate entities and don’t normally talk to each other. This is the normal way things have been done in the past and there’s little chance any government mandate will change things in the near future. However, economics are going to change this situation and change it soon. Already, especially on large vehicles, manufacturers are moving to multiplex wiring systems. This means in overly simplistic terms that instead of a separate power wire from the fuse panel to the individual components, and a separate relay controlled by another separate wire from a control switch to a relay to turn something on, there will be one common wire that will go everywhere and control signals will be sent out on this wire along with the electrical power to turn things on and off, send data to intelligent boxes and collect data from such boxes. No legal mandate is going to be needed here, the driving force is both the savings in raw materials and labor of avoiding miles of extra wire, and the engineering cost savings of not building in all of today’s separate controls and readouts. Multiplexing is a good thing for both drivers and manufacturers, but it will bring every device on the car into the view of every other device.

The second current hurdle is the telemetry solution. It’s not possible today to routinely read out data or transmit data to every car on the road. But day by day our communications infrastructure is becoming more robust, again, not by government mandate but by economic forces. Got a picture cell phone? Got XM satellite radio, got a Blackberry, got a toll transponder on your windshield? Hmmm, though ya might. These and other technologies, all driven by profit motives are proliferating more rapidly than a pundit can keep track of them and all provide or could provide the way for government to monitor. Those in the know in general terms but unfamiliar with mobile telemetry may think. yeah, sure, you can predict this but it’ll never fly in today’s world because you won’t have the bandwidth. Well, 10 years ago I was working hands on with systems that transmitted vehicle location, speed, altitude, heading and several other parameters over commercial satellite. The ‘bit cost’ for each transmission? 12 bytes. Believe me, even with a pretty slow modem you can send a _lot_ of vehicle data from and to moving vehicles for very little technical or dollar cost.

The last factor that stands in the way of universal tracking and telemetry is the US’s geographic aversion. We are an educated county but we have a huge blind spot. We have done a horrible job teaching geography and maps for the past 20 or 30 years. Because of this factor, people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, George Bush and so on are not very map oriented. GPS and physical location have been treated as a sideline science of use only to geeks and the periphery of the business world. But just stop and think for a moment of just one business model that would explode with wide-spread location availability. Satellite radio. It’s already a great concept, true to the American way. Take something freely available to any owner of a radio receiver, package it up, send it over commercial satellite and charge big bucks for a sophisticated receiver and the use of the satellite bandwidth. It’s an easy sell to nation-wide advertisers, thus a profitable venture.

But the Coca Colas’ and McDonald’s of the world are a small target market, there are millions and millions of advertisers out there who would leap at the chance to buy advertisements aimed only at their geographic areas. The commercial receivers for these services are already in the price range of nearly every motorist. It would cost at the manufacturing level perhaps $5 bucks to install a GPS chip in the receiver and maybe $10 or $20 to add a transmitter capable of sending back those 12 byte (or less) position messages. Presto, universal location based advertising.

Oh, yes, and universal tracking of all vehicles with an entertainment radio. And the owners will buy it and love it. I’m not smart enough to say this is the way it will happen. But I’m smart enough to know it will happen, and this is just one of the low cost, insidious ways that it might.