When will ITS be here?

A quite common question I get is "When will we have car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication?". This question is hard to answer because these technologies will not be part of one system. Already today we have various types of vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, for example road tolling or TMC updates. The vision of every car being connected and able to communicate with other cars I believe will take quite some time.

How does this compare to say, the Internet? Well in the Internet case we do not really have to worry about nodes that are not communication-enabled, they are simply not part of the network or any interaction that takes place in it. In the vehicular scenario non-communicative nodes influence how communicative nodes coordinate simply by their physical presence. Thus such networks, and the applications running in them, must be able to handle both equipped and non-equipped nodes from the beginning and throughout. That is why articles that talk about full rollout are a bit suspicious. Comparing again to the Internet, has it reached full rollout, will it ever?

Most likely sprinkles of different cooperative applications will appear over the coming years, and saying whether cooperative ITS "has arrived" will be quite subjective.