Ford

''Envisioning “a world where vehicles talk to one another, drivers and vehicles communicate with the city infrastructure to relieve congestion, and people routinely share vehicles or multiple forms of transportation for their daily commute,” Ford Motor Co. chief executive Mark Fields announced more than two dozen experiments the company will conduct in countries around the world with the hope of helping address several “megatrends”: population growth, an expanding middle class, public health and shifting consumer behaviors in urban areas.

Of the 25 experiments beginning this year, eight will take place in North America, seven in Asia, one in South America and nine in Europe and Africa.

In New York and London, Ford will deploy a small fleet of mini-buses that seat up to 10 passengers and will be shared among commuters, who use a smartphone app to schedule pickups and dropoffs on demand, instead of on a fixed schedule. In Atlanta, Ford has partnered with Georgia Tech on a project called Parking Spotter that uses cars’ built-in sensors to search for available parking spaces and relay that information to a database in the cloud that other drivers can access, making it easier to not only find an open spot but navigate to it, the goal being reduced fuel use and CO2 emissions.

VW

Perhaps more useful in VW’s suite of new high tech is a feature called parking guide, which finds available parking spaces using ultrasonic sensors installed in vehicles with park-assist features. While driving past parking spaces in areas that have been mapped, the car senses when a spot is open and relays it to a computing center in the cloud, which car crowd sources parking information from multiple vehicles anonymously. It isn’t real-time data; rather, it gathers occupation rates based on common patterns during a specific time of day and street section.''

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/car-647401-system-driver.html

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