IT standards are needed to green theautomotive industry, says the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and theFormula Onemotor racing organisation.
Max Mosley, head of Formula One governing body FIA, has called
for faster development of standards to support
IT in vehicles to improve safety and reduce environmental
impact.
Speaking at the ITU's annual
Fully Networked Car event at the Geneva Motor Show, Mosley said
F1's expertise in developing
green technologies could have applications beyond the sport,
particularly in fuel efficiency and monitoring environmental
impact.
Most F1 teams have as many as 300 channels of information
flowing between their cars and the pit crew, and as systems become
more complex, their interconnection will become critical, he
said.
Dr Hamadoun Touré, ITU secretary-general, said, "With the Fully
Networked Car we can provide traffic management, monitoring and
analysis, all of which will help meet the climate change
challenge.
"Those who successfully meet this challenge will end up with a
real competitive advantage in world markets."
Michel Mayer, chief executive of Freescale Semiconductor, a
supplier of IT to F1, said he was concerned at the proliferation of
proprietary standards, and called for global standards bodies such
as the ITU to take a lead.
He said it was critical for developments to be
standards-driven.
Standards priorities identified at the event included: a common
set of standards for all nomadic devices standards for
software-defined radios standards to cover the gap between the
short lifecycle of mobile phones compared with the relatively long
lifecycle of cars and privacy - the need for a common understanding
about what data is reasonable to collect and retain.