story
I found I could "break" the wave by letting a gap grow in front of me that would absorb the wave, and I wouldn't have to brake to a stop (and so my clutch would last longer).
It never occurred to me to write a paper about it :-)
How do you prevent someone from just filling the gap? If it's large enough to absorb the wave, someone will fill it just out of spite.
Besides saving your clutch, you can do this type of brake-early maneuver at stoplights. Decelerating early and coasting at a lower speed means you don't have to stop and can increase your gas mileage significantly.
On further reflection, that's not necessarily selfishness, more that they don't understand what I am trying to do, but there's no way to communicate complex information car to car on a highway.
Bluetooth had started to become standard in all cars, and as I was working on a train project, the idea occurred that if we could link all the freeway cars in series, and treat it as one long train, then I would essentially just have to steer, and we all would avoid brake-waves.
One car only needs to be able to talk to the one car in front of and the one car behind itself.
Which is better: more vehicles on the freeway at lower average speeds - or fewer, faster ones?
This is a problem that can probably be solved someday with self driving cars collaborating to make highways huge coordinated conveyor belts.
Do you not have them in the US?
Also if you WOT a modern car you get the instant response without the ecu calculating pedal angle, comparing to accelerator history, humidity factors etc etc but kiss fuel efficiency bye bye. There are mods and tunes that reprogram the fuel map to cut out this processing time
I also drive a big turbo family sedan and am used to saying 2 Mississippi before the engine pulls at full boar
