Anyway, wrt to critical mass, yep that's one of the many problems. How do you make something that relies on the network effect for its success successful before there's a network? One possibility would be to seed the system with some sort of stationary beacons in high traffic areas. These would relay info they'd collected from other cars, and possibly general traffic info from other sources. That way a driver would get some benefit even if the number of other drivers using the system was fairly small. The only way to really get it to take off would probably be some sort of onstart style deal with a major car maker.

These sorts of things are interesting to speculate about though. Perhaps there is something out there along these lines that can be done.

I've already added this as a comment to Raleighnet.org: Interesting P2P Traffic Info Idea but I thought I'd also try out the trackback feature and repost as a post on this site.