I just thought way too long about this.

If you encoded a signal in the visible lights, you’d have to flicker or flash them, which could cause an issue for epileptics. So you’d probably have to go with infrared, instead.

And that’s handy, because I’ve thought about this idea before but ruled out radio as a communication method because a radio signal is omnidirectional. While they can be approximated, a receiver can’t ‘know’ if the signal is coming from the car in front of them, or a few vehicles up.

But a flashing light on an IR camera? It’s *points* there! You could even make it so each headlight or tail light or side light or whatever relay different information or different information timings, so your computer vision system can only ‘trust’ when it sees two lights (rather than a reflected light off the side of a car or a puddle), or something.

But you can maybe use a visual signaling system to indicate something like a MAC address, or decryption info for a vehicle radio signal with a relatively small radius (a couple hundred feet?), you can establish a decent enough rolling communication platform with some ability for vehicles to ensure they aren’t getting spoofed data.

Of course - who am I kidding? If there’s ever a vehicle to vehicle communication system, it’s going to be back-ended by the StarLink network (or whatever the individual manufacturer equivalents are), you’ll be forced to sign away every right to privacy a sadistic legal team can imagine, every scrap of sensor data from your vehicle will be stored on the manufacturer’s servers, that will then be quietly shared with insurance companies, warrentlessly shared with law enforcement, sold to private credit reporting companies, traded to a slew of marketing firms, and ‘given to’ then legions of hackers.