The automotive future may look like this: Vehicles will communicate among themselves and with other entities using ?car to x? technology based on research and development aided by drones. Accidents will be greatly reduced, traffic will move more efficiently, vehicle emissions and fuel costs both will plummet, and transportation as a whole will be vastly better, say experts in industry, academia and government.

It?s all coming to us within 15 years, courtesy of Daimler AG (Mercedes Benz) of Germany, independent institute Ars Electronica FutureLab of Austria, stateside firms big and small, and with the blessing of the U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency, which see this vehicle-to-vehicle technology as ?viable? and ?valuable.?

?V2V can provide the vehicle and driver with 360-degree situational awareness to address additional crash situations, like when a driver needs to decide if it?s safe to pass on a two-lane road or make a left turn across the path of oncoming traffic. It can also alert a driver when a vehicle approaching at an intersection appears to be on a collision course,” according to the DoT. “V2V has the potential to help drivers avoid or mitigate 70 to 80 percent of vehicle crashes involving unimpaired drivers, and that could help prevent many thousands of deaths and injuries on our roads every year.?

The first major field test was two years ago and included nearly 3,000 cars, trucks, and buses outfitted with V2V communications technology. ?Test vehicles were able to send and receive anonymous safety data messages between one another. Many of these vehicles were also able to translate the data into a warning to the driver in case of an impending crash.?

Earlier this month the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor launched an initiative to implement a working, connected and automated car system.

The patent-pending Mobility Transformation Facility, a public-private partnership, will take up 32 acres of simulated city center and four-lane highway when it opens later this autumn. The College of Engineering contributed funding for the facility, and two of its robotics researchers will be among its first users.

Companies ponying up $1 million each to be part of it include Econolite, General Motors, Ford Motor Co., Honda, Nissan and Toyota. The project hopes to amass up to $100 million by 2021 when the project is set to be completed, per the Insurance Journal. Also participating are Delphi Automotive, Denso Corp., Robert Bosch, GmBH, Verizon, Xerox and State Farm.

V2V is different from but often used along with the technology for cars that drive themselves such as those long under development at Google.

Inter-vehicle communication was demonstrated just days ago at the ITS World Congress in Detroit, which attracted some 10,000 visitors.

?Systems that enable vehicles to communicate with each other have been developed in recent years in parallel with features that enable cars to drive themselves. Manufacturers and suppliers now are putting the two together in novel ways, with broad implications for vehicle safety and convenience,? Reuters says.

Small new companies are also part of innovative technology, such as Peleton, a Silicon Valley startup with a Stanford pedigree involved in ?vehicle-to-vehicle communications and radar-based active braking systems combined with sophisticated vehicle control algorithms to link pairs of heavy trucks.?

But it?s not just all about motors. Mercedes, for instance, isn?t forgetting the human element.

?Robotic cars have to act as proactively as possible?internally and externally?in signaling their current status and their next move, even if this is totally unnecessary from a purely technical point of view,? says Martina Mara in a recent interview with FutureLab. ?They have to give a clear indication of their intentions that is easily understood by all. For example, a little kid has to be able to immediately recognize the difference between a self-driving vehicle and a conventional car driven by a human being.?

?The traffic of the future will become increasingly interactive ? and I don’t just mean the networking of vehicles,? says Mara?s colleague Herbert Kohler, Head of Group Research and Sustainability and Chief Environmental Officer. “We view it as our elementary task to put autonomous cars on the road not just as technological achievements but also to make them an integral part of the traffic of the future.?

The car with the star hopes to have the first such autos on the road, and with FutureLab, recently conducted tests wherein ?three interactive quadcopters were hailed, stopped or steered in a certain direction using gesture control or a haptic control object ? This gave an initial ideal of what co-existence between humans and autonomous machines could feel like in the shared space of the future.?

FutureLab tells RBR that the drones used in the test were of the Hummingbird model from Ascending Technologies of Krailling, Germany, and, equipped with LEDs, are termed spaxels or ?space pixels? for their ability to make up a drone swarm that can draw 3D figures in mid-air.