The US Department of Transport is launching a year long trial involving 2,800 vehicles to study data uploaded via dedicated short range communications (DSRC):

The deployment includes approximately 2,800 cars, trucks and buses, 300 of which are getting aftermarket safety devices to beam data like position, velocity, and acceleration to and from neighboring vehicles and infrastructure ten times every second. Another 64 will be “fully integrated,” with safety systems installed during production, while the remainder will have simple transmission-only devices.

The data is transmitted using a high-speed, low-latency medium called dedicated short-range communications or DSRC. The specification is similar to Wi-Fi, but transmissions happen on the licensed 5.9GHz band rather than on Wi-Fi’s unlicensed 2.4GHz frequencies, using the 75MHz of spectrum the FCC specifically set aside for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications.

I suspect though most cars will probably end up having some form of WiFi, probably internally to connect to smartphones etc. It would seem that the near future newly manufactured cars will have some sort of DSRC communication. It will be interesting to see whether it will become mandatory for older cars to have this technology installed.

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