DETROIT – General Motors announced it is participating in a U.S. Department of Transportation program to test vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications technologies. The automaker is providing a total of eight vehicles, V2V-equipped Buck and Cadillac cars, to the Connected Vehicle Safety Pilot Model Deployment program for a year.

The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) is conducting the program, which will test how effective V2V and V2I technologies are at reducing collisions. The vehicles from GM will join others that are part of a much larger group of 2,850 vehicles UMTRI is testing in the program.

“Participating in this program will help GM and our research partners gain a more accurate, detailed understanding of V2V and V2I’s potential safety benefits,” said Nady Boules, GM Global R&D director of the Electrical and Control Systems Research Lab. “It is essential that common standards and security framework be established for V2V and V2I technologies so that vehicles from different automakers can communicate and interoperate with each other in a consistent manner.”

The V2V vehicles GM is providing will be using “production-viable” systems that can send information to, and receive information from, other vehicles, thereby warning drivers when the systems detect a potential collision.

“This program will help GM determine a timeline for introducing V2V technology on our vehicles, globally, in the second half of this decade,” said Hariharan Krishnan, GM R&D technical fellow for Perception and Vehicle Control Systems. “It will take approximately another five years of market penetration for customers to truly benefit from the technology. Ultimately, V2V and V2I technologies stand to improve traffic safety and efficiency for many drivers.”