If you spend any time driving in a city you’re familiar with traffic jams. Volkswagen is working on a way around that… literally. They’re using quantum computing to help chart routes through traffic.
This is different from the navigation in your vehicle. What you have at your fingertips provides an individual vehicle with the shortest way to your destination taking existing traffic into account. However, your vehicle’s navigation system doesn’t take other vehicles’ navigation routes into account, and individual navigation settings could send a lot of traffic on the same route creating another backup.
What’s VW’s system does is come up with routes for multiple vehicles. They demonstrated it recently during a conference in Lisbon, Portugal using nine public transit buses. The quantum computer calculated the fastest route for all nine buses at the same time.
Volkswagen says the technology is still in its early stages, but they believe it would beneficial to fleet operators. They hope to develop it so it can be configured to any fleet in any city. VW is looking at cities around the world for pilot projects.
