You’re cruising to pick up nibbles for a relaxing weekend in the mountains with friends. The sun is shining. The birds are chirping. It’s a beautiful day and all you can think is “Damn, life is good.”

Then SLAM! Out of nowhere, like a scene from an action movie, your car is T-boned by an SUV entering the intersection from the opposite cross street. The driver was talking on his mobile phone and ran the red light. Instead of skiing in deep powder for the next few days, you will spend the next few months in painful physical therapy learning how to walk again.

Or worse.

According to the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration, 32,367 people were killed in the estimated 5,338,000 police-reported motor vehicle traffic crashes–like the one imagined above–in 2011 alone (the most recent accounting). That means an average of 89 people died each day in motor vehicle crashes, one every 16 minutes. Another 2,217,000 people were injured in those accidents.

It doesn’t have to be this way. For the last decade or so, the government and most automakers have been developing a system that could potentially reduce certain types of common accidents by up to 80%. Experts refer to it as vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure technology, collectively known as V2X. It offers the potential for significant improvements in driver awareness including collision, hazardous road and curve speed warnings, and traffic flow information. It’s considered to be an essential component to the success of driverless cars. But the speed at which vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure communications come into the mainstream is determined by the speed at which we accept the technologies–a true chicken-and-egg conundrum.

“Being able to connect vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure enables automakers to develop truly intelligent cars–vehicles with increasing levels of knowledge about the driver and driving conditions, from the road itself to buildings to the weather, says Paul Mascarenas, chief technical officer at Ford, a company entrenched in the development of V2V and V2I technologies, as well as the development of automated car tech. Ford recently announced the development of an automated research vehicle that was developed in collaboration with the University of Michigan and State Farm Insurance. “Combined with the cloud’s capability to process large amounts of data very quickly, the car is then able to use that information to provide drivers a level of assistance, convenience, and safety far beyond current expectations,” Mascarenas adds.

Fully realized V2V would allow cars in the same area to constantly communicate with one another over a wireless network, exchanging data about each vehicle’s speed, location, and direction of travel. V2I allows cars to communicate with roadside infrastructure, such as traffic lights and cameras, etc. This type of roadside information network could relay information about road closures, detours, or construction zones, as well as warn a driver of, say, an upcoming school safety zone and encourage that driver to slow down.