road.cc live blog: Terpstra takes E3 Harelbeke, buy Lance's house, limited edition Cannondale Supersix, bicycle-to-vehicle beacons proposed + more

That Cannondale looks great.  You don't often see British Racing Green on a bike.

“It is not easy for human drivers to see cyclists on the roads" Manuel Marsilio - general manager of the Confederation for the European Bicycle Industry

Yes, actually it is QUITE easy to see cyclists on the roads IF you are paying attention & looking where you are pointing your two tonne lump of steel. With 'friends' like this in the industry, who needs enemies...

Most people probably already have a highly detectable beacon - their phone. It's likely squawking out all sort of radio signals (WiFi, Bluetooth, ANT+, 3g/4g etc.) right now.

It's not "victim blaming" to envisage a future where road users are sharing speed, direction and position information in an effort to avoid hitting each other. It's already used extensively in the air and at sea (AIS). At sea it's mandatory for big heavy stuff to have AIS (>300t I think). E.g. http://shipfinder.co/ - and an awful lot of smaller craft use it as well along with sonar, radar and, yes, eyeballs.

Maybe Garmin will bake their LiveTrack system into all their devices in future and build automotive versions...maybe they have already.

On the subject of bicycle / car sensors.

Lets go a step further so the software in the car can detect dangerous overtaking distances between the two sensors, then feed this back directly to the driver's insurance provider, who can then increase their insurance premiums accordingly.

The government can offer a free standard version of the bike beacon, paid for by also offering a super-lightweight carbon fibre version for 'proper' cyclists who wouldn't be able to resist the marginal gains.

It will not work in Colchester.

Car detects bike with chip, driver ignores the warning, status quo. 

This appears to be a new version of victim blaming; it'll be the cyclists fault for not fitting the latest gadget.

It is the responsibility of the people causing the danger to prevent/reduce that danger, not for cyclists and pedestrians to have to take actions to avoid being run over.  Make the vehicle technology safe or keep it off the road.

Re 'Ouch'.

A Darwin Award must be in the post - especially if next time he smashes his bollocks into that wall!

Seems to me that that whole thing would be monumentally hackable. The beacon will need to be small and low-powered so they'll be really easy to hide. IBM announced tech this week smaller than a grain of rice that could be used for this.

What's to stop you, for example, hiding one in a manhole cover or on a bollard and bringing traffic to a halt? 

Or taking primary and riding at 5mph preventing the vehicle from overtaking?

Its all completely unworkable and the logical extrapolation will be to ban pedestrians and cycles (and motorcycles and horses) from areas where driverless vehicles operate.

And then we get to my neck of the woods where there are unfenced roads and livestock roaming about - I guess that means they'll all need to be tagged too.

Sensors to also measure passing distance and batch report anything too close? 

Why do we keep trying to invent things that dull the attention of road users? It's bad enough that most cars resemble starship command inside now. The last thing we need is going from SMIDSY to sorry my detection system didn't see you mate and besides I was looking at facebook anyway.

My brother recently moved to Australia and said the driving standard is dire over there and reckons part of it is everyone driving automatics. It's just a another level of disconnect from driving.

I'm calling bullshit on the bike detection technology. Half the time, drivers can see the bike perfectly well, but will still insist on overtaking at inappropriate times/places and without any due consideration. How will a detection system improve that?

ermmm... bicycles already have retro-reflectors mounted on them... perhaps these vehicle systems 'experts' should consider devising some device which scans the field of view and detects reflected 'light'... sort of like a radar does but with an infra red low power eyesafe laser?

And yet, a car supposedly dripping with the latest detection technology and fail safe automated braking systems  ploughs into and kills  a pedestrian crossing the road in Arizona. ?

I'd like to have a device on my bike that sent an electric shock to the bollocks of the driver of a car detected within a metre of my bike. Said shock to increase the closer the vehicle gets. I'd happily pay for that, in fact.

Okay, I'll bite...

Who will have to pay to retro-fit beacons to existing bikes?

Who will pay to retro-fit the detection and collision avoidance technology to all the existing cars trucks, vans, lorries, buses and taxis out there?

Who will be judged at fault in a collision between a beaconless bike and a sensor equipped vehicle?