Traffic lights – are they a bane or a boon? It really depends on which city you live in though, but IBM aims to usher in a new era of traffic lights thanks to a recent patent application known as “A System and Method for Controlling Vehicle Engine Running State at Busy Intersections for Increased Fuel Consumption Efficiency” which will prevent cars from running red lights. The way it does so? Simple – remotely stopping vehicle engines. According to the patent description, this system is able to receive position data from all vehicles that are waiting at traffic lights, sending a “stop-engine” notification to vehicles that have already been waiting for more than a specified amount of time. We do wonder whether this applies to motorbikes as well though. Hopefully this will be a failsafe system that is impervious to hackers, otherwise anyone who gains access to the system will have a field day wreaking havoc at all intersections. Just don’t use Windows as the operating system of choice, eh?
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