Exactly right. Just yesterday we discussed these problems over a beer at my faculty with my collegeas of the deparment of control system. I said myself that making the road train idea work would require a team of many phsygo-analists, social scientish, lawyers, marketeers and promotors and only 2 to 3 technical engineers. The project would be devoting 80 % of its time and efforts to designing and implementing the introduction and general acceptence and only about 20 on hardcore technical aspects.

Actually, it seems that one avenue is being succesfully implemented at this time. Our control systems deparment is part of a European wide effort of Universities and car manufactures to design and implement an intelligent cruise control.

This system will not only maintain speed at a given value but also adjust this value to the required minimum distance to the car in front. The car companies want to sell this as an extra benefit in top of the line cars; thus making a status symbol out of it just like they did with GPS driven routing aids. I expect that in time everybody wants one because it is cool now ! From then onwards it is indeed only a very small step to go to full train-forming. Afterall, you only need a control system to maintain your car at about 1-2 feet behind the one in front. The steering can still be done by the human driving the car. This will also negate some of the confidence issue that plain humans may have with new technologies. Of course they can always decide to leave the train by steering their car to the side and out of the train. Of course this is a pretty useless thing to do but most people won't understand it that way and just feel more secure because they think that they have a meaningful control in the whole setup. Just like passengers in a fly-by-wire-auto-piloted airplane were they feel the pilot can safe the day when need be. Of course most of the time he can't in the case of a serious control system failure.

Wouter