Car Talk: Your Vehicle is About to Get Chatty

Originally published July 15, 2015

When John Adams needed to get from General Washington’s command post at Cambridge, Massachusetts to the seat of our nascent government in Philadelphia in the winter of 1776, it took him about two weeks on horseback, says historian David McCullough. The idea of a horseless carriage that could trim the travel time between those cities to six hours was probably beyond his imagination. Yet our relationship with cars is now so deep and personal that we often engage with our nation’s founding principles when describing it. Freedom and autonomy are so linked to both the American ideal and the automobile that the concepts nearly merge. But soon, this relationship will change: we may lose the freedom to control our cars.

On February 3rd, 2014, the US Secretary of Transportation, Anthony Foxx, gave a press conference where he revealed that the government was planning to draft rules requiring all cars to adopt a vehicle-to-vehicle communication system, or V2V. As the New York Times reported, the …