Study of coupling technologies for personal vehicle transit

Personal vehicle transit is focused on as a key technology to solve transit issues in Japan. Some traveling salesmen and deliverymen in urban areas travel using personal vehicles instead of vehicles or motorcycles. However, few families use personal vehicles. This study investigates coupling technologies that will encourage families to purchase personal vehicles. Coupling technologies should offer reliability, operability, and cost balance. Therefore, we comparatively evaluate three coupling devices having different characteristics using identical personal vehicles. All the coupling devices use vehicle-to-vehicle communication. The characteristics of these coupling devices are explained, and their present accomplishments are discussed.