Rush hour traffic isn’t fun for anyone and the frustration is further exacerbated when you have to come to a complete stop for no reason in particular. This is due to what is called the “accordion effect” and Honda has developed technology that could make it a thing of the past.

Look at the diagram below. If one car has to brake suddenly for whatever reason, the car behind it has to slow down to prevent a fender-bender. As a result of the second car slowing down, the car behind that has to slow down more. And the car behind that has to slow down even more, creating a “backward travelling wave” of slower and slower traffic. And that’s how you get a traffic jam and that’s how, somewhere down that wave, cars may have to stop altogether.

What Honda has done is developed technology that will detect the driving patterns of a vehicle that may lead to this kind of congestion. The system monitors acceleration and deceleration patterns, offering suggestions on how to minimize the accordion effect. In short, it’s about minimizing the need to quickly accelerate and quickly brake, instead driving as smoothly as possible.

This is all well and good, but there’s at least one major speedbump: other drivers. When you use the “congestion minimizer system” and leave extra distance from the vehicle in front of you, more likely than not a car from the other lane is going to seize the opportunity to fill that gap with the conviction that your lane is now the faster one. The way you get around this is if every car on the road uses this and it’s used in conjunction with Adaptive Cruise Control that taps into cloud servers, viewing and predicting the traffic patterns ahead.

In any case, the first Honda public road tests of the system are being planned for Italy in May and then Indonesia in July.

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The biggest inefficiency that you’ll find on the highway has to do with the acceleration and deceleration of the cars around you. This creates all these empty pockets of road and it has a weird domino effect on traffic. Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is supposed to fix that. And that technology is precisely the focus of the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) that took place over the weekend. Eleven teams from nine different countries took part with their own CACC-equipped vehicles. The cars “talk” to one another through an obstacle course, staying as close together as possible to reduce wind resistance and increase the number of cars that can fit on the same stretch of road.

The first Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) on Sunday 15 May was won by the German team AnnieWay of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. During the Cooperative Driving Weekend, part of Automotive Week 2011, it had the best cooperative driving result in an exciting international challenge against ten other teams. “Both the partners involved – High Tech Automotive Campus, TNO, Province of Noord-Brabant, SRE and Helmond municipality – and the participating teams were very enthusiastic about how this GCDC went.

They use wireless communications, along with cameras and GPS, to get the job done. By communicating with one another, they can be as efficient as possible. This is quite different from conventional adaptive cruise control, where each car is independently monitoring the other cars. Here, they’re working as a team.

We’ve seen visions of cars driving bumper-to-bumper down the Interstate thanks to tech like this, reducing the need for any sudden braking or acceleration. Whether or not these really are the cars of the future remains to be seen, but for CACC to really work, every car on the road has to be on board.

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