Right now the primary role of the Global Positioning System (GPS) is to tell you exactly where you are, or at least fairly exactly where you are. This is extremely useful in helping you find your way to places, or in helping things like emergency service vehicles find their way to you. But the people who market cars have a whole bunch more plans for GPS and its successor, Digital Global Positioning (DGPS), as will become apparent over time. Among other things, it could be used to save thousands of lives in North America.
Christopher Wilson, the manager of the Telematics and Safety Group of DaimlerChrysler's Research and Technology division in Palo Alto, California, has a plan to begin saving those lives. At DaimlerChrysler's recent Innovation Symposium in Stuttgart, Wilson made his idea perfectly plain: "If a car knows where it is and receives another car's positional data, a collision can be avoided."
Wilson believes that, in 10 to 15 years, Position Aware Safety Systems (PASS) "will be making an important contribution to highway safety. Telematics systems will enable vehicles to communicate with each other." So not only will your car be able to talk to you, it will be able to talk to other cars. In Wilson's view, this conversation will primarily involve location information. As in, I'm at 88888.98 latitude and 9999.9999 degrees longitude heading north, so please do not try to put yourself in that space.