OLATHE, Kan. -- Wouldn't it be nice to know when that red light will turn green? Newer models of Audi vehicles can now do just that in Olathe, Kansas.
"It's what we call a more comfortable, more relaxed form of driving," said Pom Molhotra, Director of Connected Vehicles and Data at Audi of America.
The company is expanding its Traffic Light Information service to the city.
"Olathe actually has 100 percent of its traffic lights connected centrally, which means that there's one centralized operator command center that controls all the traffic lights in that area and timing of those lights," said Molhotra in an interview with 41 Action News.
Traffic Light Information is an Audi connect PRIME feature available on select 2017 and 2018 models. It enables the car to communicate with the infrastructure in certain cities across the U.S.
When one of these vehicles approaches a traffic light, it receives real-time information. If the light is red, the feature will display the amount of time before the light turns green.
"Over the years, the automotive industry has made a lot of strides in connectivity," said Molhotra. "If you see the signal is not going to turn green for 60 seconds, that might motivate you to take your foot off the gas, relax a bit, listen to a song on the radio. In general, what we observe is giving this type of information to the driver creates the same kind of positive behavior changes that you would see by giving that type of information to a pedestrian in a crosswalk."
Audi said the information they collect at each traffic light will also be given back to the city.
"This is the kind of data that the city would have to spend a lot of money doing research on at specific intersections," Molhotra said. "Now they can get this at all intersections for extended periods of time, study these traffic patterns and decide if they need to re-time the signals or change any other aspects of the city's infrastructure from a traffic light standpoint."
This technology is currently available in parts of California, Oregon, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and Washington, D.C.
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