Audi Sees Red... and Amber and Green

Audi, those whacky Germans who like to build crazy fast station wagons, have announced some pretty cool tech coming our way some time in the near future.

The new tech, called Travolution, involves traffic lights but don't let that get you down as its ultimate goal is to save you some cash. As Autoblog puts it, "Travolution establishes a connection between a red light and a vehicle, so that as a specially equipped car moves toward a red light at an intersection, stop light gantries fitted with communications modules can let the car know when the light will turn green. The car then lets the driver know what speed he should maintain in order to pass through the intersection without having to brake for the light and then accelerate again. " Nice.

Unfortunately the traffic lights themselves need to be updated so it's quite a big buy-in for local governments but hopefully Audi have made Travolution an open standard so other manufacturers can get in on the action.

2009 BMW 7 Series: Electronic Back Seat Driver

A little write up over at CarAdvice.com.au talks about one of the coolest features in a new car since sliced bread (huh?). We've had trip computers and speed monitoring computers in cars for ages but this new feature called Speed Limit Display will, well, display the speed limit.

The system uses a little camera mounted near the passenger side rear-vision mirror which watches the side of the road for any speed limit signs (including those funky LED-based electronic ones they like to use around construction zones) and pops up a little alert on the car's HUD if you're going over it.

However, before alerting the driver the new system chats with the car's nav system to see if the speed matches the speed in the GPS data so maybe it's not exactly like a back seat driver.

Oh, and BMW really wants to make sure you understand that the system won't try to slow you down, we wouldn't want THAT now would we!?

Read more about the 2009 BMW 7-series.