Ford Motor Company has filed a patent for a vehicle to everything communication system that may be used in future Ford vehicles, Ford Authority has learned.
The patent was filed on November 14th, 2023, published on May 15th, 2025, and assigned serial number 0157336.
The Ford Authority Take
Ford has filed patents exploring various ways its future vehicles might be better at detecting the presence of pedestrians and mitigating the effects of impacts with them multiple times over the past few years, which makes sense given the rise in vehicle-on-pedestrian accidents as of late. That list includes ideas for a system designed to estimate the speed of a pedestrian, an external airbag system for pedestrians, and an adaptive pedestrian alert system. Now, this newly published patent presents us with an idea for a vehicle to everything communication system that may be used in future Ford vehicles, too.
The idea here is to create a system that enables a vehicle to communicate with other vehicles, infrastructure, and user devices, with one particular goal in mind – to help prevent vehicles from running into folks that are walking or riding their bikes on a trail. In many cases, trails that intersect roadways have signs and other warning features designed to bring attention to the drivers of approaching vehicles, but in this case, Ford proposes taking things a step further by using vehicle-to-everything technology to better detect the presence of people and avoid accidents at trail crossings.
“Submitting patent applications is a normal part of any strong business as the process protects new ideas and helps us build a robust portfolio of intellectual property,” Ford said in a statement. “The ideas described within a patent application should not be viewed as an indication of our business or product plans. No matter what the patent application outlines, we will always put the customer first in the decision-making behind the development and marketing of new products and services.”
Comments
If you had such a system in your car, you could be more likely to run over the person. The human eye is very good at detecting movement at the edge of its periphery; seeing something out of the corner of your eye, in other words. At 30mph, you are traveling at 44 feet per second (fps). Your eye detects motion on the right 45 feet ahead, and your brain says slow down! Instinctively you hit the brakes, the vehicle travels another 20 ft before coming to a halt 1 ft away from the ped. You and the ped are alarmed at the narrow miss, and life goes on. With Ford’s system, sensors detect and process movement, say in 30 milliseconds, another 20ms to put up a message on the display., “walker approaching, slow down.” The vehicle has travelled another 1.3 ft. So far so good. Instinctively your eyes divert to the closest “threat” which is the message. The average adult reads and comprehends at about 249 words per minute, so 4 words take another 1 second to read and comprehend (249wpm ÷ 60sec = 4.15 words in 1 second) and you have travelled a total of 45.3 ft, hitting the pedestrian before you hit the brakes. Tech for tech’s sake; it all started with self-cancelling turn signals.
In the 1800’s children who had their noses buried in books were scoffed at and ridiculed.
Now they whine that kids don’t read books.
You are the kind that needs to get outside and put the books down.