Audi has announced a new service within their advanced technology feature set that they are branding Audi connect Prime. This advanced feature set belongs to a technology referred to as vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) service in which the automobile talks to physical devices that are part of our infrastructure and shares information that is usable by either the vehicle or the infrastructure.
This is pretty cool technology, though because of the vast amount of infrastructure that needs to be upgraded to support this kind of communication, it probably is not going to have widespread adoption in the near future.
Audi's initial implementation will involve the vehicle communicating to stop lights. The stop lights will communicate there status of either red or green as well as communicate when they will be changing.
On the surface, this may seem somewhat limited in usefulness but think about the implications of a vehicle approaching a stop light and the stop light informing the vehicle that the vehicle will not make it to the stop light in a green condition. Upon gaining that knowledge, a semi-autonomous vehicle could begin to slow down to avoid abrupt deceleration and rather than maintaining the speed limit could begin to coast to a stop which has gas mileage benefits.
Source and discussion here.
