103 學年度學測英文 第 54 題

Today the car seems to make periodic leaps in progress. A variety of driver assistance technologies are appearing on new cars. A developing technology called Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication, or V2V, is being tested by automotive manufacturers as a way to help reduce the number of accidents. V2V works by using wireless signals to send information back and forth between cars about their location, speed and direction, so that they keep safe distances from each other. Another new technology being tested is Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communication, or V2I. V2I would allow vehicles to communicate with road signs or traffic signals and provide information to the vehicle about safety issues. V2I could also request traffic information from a traffic management system and access the best possible routes. Both V2V and V2I have the potential to reduce around 80 percent of vehicle crashes on the road.

More and more new cars can reverse-park, read traffic signs, maintain a safe distance in steady traffic and brake automatically to avoid crashes. Moreover, a number of firms are creating cars that drive themselves to a chosen destination without a human at the controls. It is predicted that driverless cars will be ready for sale within five years. If and when cars go completely driverless, the benefits will be enormous. Google, which already uses prototypes of such cars to ferry its staff along Californian freeways, once put a blind man in a prototype and filmed him being driven off to buy takeaway hamburgers. If this works, huge numbers of elderly and disabled people can regain their personal mobility. The young will not have to pay crippling motor insurance, because their reckless hands and feet will no longer touch the wheel or the accelerator. People who commute by car will gain hours each day to work, rest, or read a newspaper.