In an effort to improve road safety for motorcyclists, a number of motorcycle manufacturers are co-operating to connect motorcycles with other vehicles and infrastructure.

In the Connected Motorcycle Consortium (CMC) motorcycle manufacturers BMW, Honda, KTM and Yamaha work together to develop new standards and techniques to connect motorcycles with other vehicles and infrastructure. CMC has aimed its first important goal by publishing the first ‘basic specification’.

CMC started in 2016, because C-ITS (Cooperative Intelligent Transport System) specifications for passenger cars had not taken motorcycle specific safety factors and challenges into consideration sufficiently. The consortium aims at joining forces between motorcycle manufacturers, suppliers, research institutes and associations, to make motorcycles part of the future connected mobility.

The first goal was to define a first ‘basic specification’ for motorcycles to connect and ‘talk the same language’ to other vehicles or infrastructure by means of wireless communication. This is being achieved with the official publication of a set of documents to address various topics related to the introduction of C-ITS for motorcycles. The documents are available for download on the CMC website.

The next move will be CMC ‘NEXT’ with a wider scope. Motorcycle experts will be looking at further improvements of the specification while at the same time taking account of new functions supported by on-board sensors both in cars and in motorcycles.

Comment from FEMA General Secretary Dolf Willigers: “I am very glad that the motorcycle industry has joined forces to develop these specifications. The most occurring accident with motorcycles is when turning car drivers do not notice the oncoming motorcycle, but also in other situations car drivers have a problem with that. The new technologies that are involved here will assist the car drivers in their task and by doing so will make the road safer for motorcyclists.”

Dolf continues: “Some other applications for which specifications are developed by CMC will help the rider to notice potential hazards that are unexpected, so that the rider can take actions to prevent them developing into critical situations. I congratulate CMC with this great result, and we will keep supporting them in the next step.”

Top photograph courtesy of Bosch

Illustrations courtesy of CMC

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