What It’d Take to Build an Uncrashable Car

As far as cars go, the Infiniti JX35 is a pretty smart cookie. Try to back up into somebody or something (a task you’d have to be a complete moron â€" or an unwise journalist â€" to actually pursue), and it beeps, switches the large dash display to a view of a rear-mounted camera, and, if all else fails, hits the brakes for you. The JX35 isn’t quite an uncrashable car (its tech is understandably focused on preventing back-up collisions), but it’s a nice step, considering the frustrating fact that even today’s newest, most technologically advanced cars operate as little bubbles on the highway. My totally impractical, ridiculously expensive, and not-at-all-original plan for eliminating 90 percent of car collisions overnight: Remove every single vehicle we have on the road today, and replace them with modem-enabled cars that communicate and signal to each other when they’re about to collide, causing the offenders to stop or serve. Compared to Google’s driverless cars that you’ve probably read about, what I’m talking about is painfully simple. Heck, toss wheels on an iPhone, and it could probably pull it off. Yet despite the fact that virtually anything with a battery or plug now has some sort of wireless communication built into it, today’s cars remain frustratingly isolated from the grander grid. Sure, cars use Bluetooth to sync phones, satellite to pull music from the stars, and sometimes even Wi-Fi to fill car cabins with kid-calming entertainment. But when it comes to actually getting our cars to signal to each other that two fenders are about to collide… well even your iPhone’s Bump app is a step ahead of them. I’m far from the first person to wax on about the possibilities of a connected auto fleet. As experts with more expertise than myself have pointed out, such a state wouldn’t just reduce accidents, it would also improve traffic flow and save an enormous amount of fuel by putting a brain behind the chaotic stop-and-go traffic that currently slows commutes and goggles up gas. Of course, looking forward to a future such as this, even today’s most advanced safety features feel like somebody stitching together a zine, when the Internet is just around the corner. Automakers are forced to make do with what they have, and crashes are only as rare as the most collision-prone drivers on the road allow them to be. SEE ALSO: Automakers: Your High-Tech Dashboards Are Frustrating (and Possibly Dangerous) Which is why automakers put their efforts into situations they can control. When you’re alone in a driveway or parking lot, you actually are operating as a bubble, more or less independent of the uncontrollable traffic around you. By building a back-up collision prevention system into the JX35, Infiniti is essentially seeking to master one of the few on-road situations that can be mastered. And, in doing so, they’ve built a car that could substantially reduce the risk of backing up into a wall or child while in a driveway or parking lot. Sure, this isn’t quite as glamorous as a robot steering you out of the way of an oncoming car, but it’s just as important. And once our cars have totally mastered the most controllable of scenarios â€" those with little to no traffic where cars actually do, more or less, operate as independent bubbles â€" well, then the real fun will begin.