 This is Chris with The Verge and we're here at CES 2014 looking at Ford's vehicle-to-vehicle communication demo. This is all about safety. We're in a little road course that's set up in a parking lot across the street from the convention center here at CES. There are two Taurus's and they're wired up with this system that's constantly broadcasting information about where the car is, what direction it's facing, the yaw, the speed, and the concept is that by transmitting that information to other cars, this car can stay safer by knowing where that car is. So the first scenario Ford demonstrated for us was the idea of you overtaking a car in Expressway for instance. A lot of cars now have what are called bliss sensors, which are these little amber lights that are in the side view mirrors that indicate when there's somebody in your blind spot, but the problem is that they don't work at speed necessarily and they don't work when a car is way behind you. So when you have these cars transmitting data to one another, you enable that. You don't need a sensor that has to shoot that far behind you, you just communicate via what is effectively a Wi-Fi-like standard the car's positions relative to one another and then the car in front knows, hey, I shouldn't merge over right now because there's a car that's about to overtake me. The system can literally see through cars. If there's a vehicle in front of you that doesn't have vehicle-to-vehicle communication enabled, but the one in front of it does and that car brakes hard, your car will know so that you have more advanced warning that you need to slow down. They showed us a second example of this sort of seeing through cars situation where say you're pulling up to a toll booth, the vehicle in front of you suddenly swerves out of the way and the vehicle ahead of that is stopped. Well before you wouldn't have been able to see that, but with this system you can because your car knew all along exactly where the car in the very front was. So if you're traveling at speed you can get a warning that you need to slow down. You're not going to be surprised when the car in front of you swerves out of the way. And finally we saw what could happen when a car goes through a red light. Well actually we didn't see that and that's a good thing and that's because we had the system in place. So say you're coming up to an intersection, you have a green light, you go. Well if a car is coming at speed in the other direction, it has a red light, doesn't see the red light, you're dealing with a drunk driver, who knows, and they have that vehicle-to-vehicle communication system enabled, they're going to be able to communicate to your vehicle that they're moving quickly, your car is going to know to tell you to stop, even though you have the green light. Unfortunately this technology isn't super close to going into production. There are a few different challenges. One is that the standard still isn't set in stone. Secondly they're dealing with a few problems. Take for instance when you have 10,000 cars on LA traffic and they've been stuck there for days on end in close proximity. The bandwidth just isn't there to support that many cars all shooting these signals at the same time. So they're figuring out what to do about that. But if they can overcome that stuff, Ford is saying that we might see this on the road, say about 2020, which by the way happens to be about the same time frame for fully automated cars. We'll obviously see how this plus self-driving could work hand-in-hand.
 This is Chris with The Verge and we're here at CES 2014 looking at Ford's vehicle-to-vehicle
 communication demo.
 This is all about safety.
 We're in a little road course that's set up in a parking lot across the street from the
 convention center here at CES.
 There are two Taurus's and they're wired up with this system that's constantly broadcasting
 information about where the car is, what direction it's facing, the yaw, the speed, and the
 concept is that by transmitting that information to other cars, this car can stay safer by
 knowing where that car is.
 So the first scenario Ford demonstrated for us was the idea of you overtaking a car in
 Expressway for instance.
 A lot of cars now have what are called bliss sensors, which are these little amber lights
 that are in the side view mirrors that indicate when there's somebody in your blind spot,
 but the problem is that they don't work at speed necessarily and they don't work when
 a car is way behind you.
 So when you have these cars transmitting data to one another, you enable that.
 You don't need a sensor that has to shoot that far behind you, you just communicate
 via what is effectively a Wi-Fi-like standard the car's positions relative to one another
 and then the car in front knows, hey, I shouldn't merge over right now because there's a car
 that's about to overtake me.
 The system can literally see through cars.
 If there's a vehicle in front of you that doesn't have vehicle-to-vehicle communication
 enabled, but the one in front of it does and that car brakes hard, your car will know so
 that you have more advanced warning that you need to slow down.
 They showed us a second example of this sort of seeing through cars situation where say
 you're pulling up to a toll booth, the vehicle in front of you suddenly swerves out of the
 way and the vehicle ahead of that is stopped.
 Well before you wouldn't have been able to see that, but with this system you can because
 your car knew all along exactly where the car in the very front was.
 So if you're traveling at speed you can get a warning that you need to slow down.
 You're not going to be surprised when the car in front of you swerves out of the way.
 And finally we saw what could happen when a car goes through a red light.
 Well actually we didn't see that and that's a good thing and that's because we had the
 system in place.
 So say you're coming up to an intersection, you have a green light, you go.
 Well if a car is coming at speed in the other direction, it has a red light, doesn't see
 the red light, you're dealing with a drunk driver, who knows, and they have that vehicle-to-vehicle
 communication system enabled, they're going to be able to communicate to your vehicle
 that they're moving quickly, your car is going to know to tell you to stop, even though you
 have the green light.
 Unfortunately this technology isn't super close to going into production.
 There are a few different challenges.
 One is that the standard still isn't set in stone.
 Secondly they're dealing with a few problems.
 Take for instance when you have 10,000 cars on LA traffic and they've been stuck there
 for days on end in close proximity.
 The bandwidth just isn't there to support that many cars all shooting these signals
 at the same time.
 So they're figuring out what to do about that.
 But if they can overcome that stuff, Ford is saying that we might see this on the road,
 say about 2020, which by the way happens to be about the same time frame for fully automated
 cars.
 We'll obviously see how this plus self-driving could work hand-in-hand.