BMW’s EnLighten app wants to take away your red light blues

As anyone who commutes knows, waiting at traffic lights sucks. It's also not great for the environment. All too many drivers will accelerate hard and then brake to a stop, only to sit there idling their engines waiting for a green, burning unnecessary gas all the way.

The EnLighten display, running on a BMW.

BMW

 In part, the push towards V2I—vehicle to infrastructure—communications systems is meant to help solve this problem, timing traffic signals for optimum traffic flow. V2I is still some years away, but in the meantime BMW has released an iOS app that achieves some of the same functions, at least for drivers in Oregon (Portland and Eugene) or Salt Lake City.

The EnLighten app—which has actually been available as a standalone iOS and Android app for a while now—lives on a driver's iOS phone but runs through BMW's iDrive infotainment system. When running, the iDrive screen shows the status of the nearest traffic signal ahead, along with a real-time prediction of when the light will change.

EnLighten, which has been developed by a company called Connected Signals, works by interfacing with the city's traffic management system, then combines that data with the car's location (via GPS). And although the BMW version of Enlighten currently only works in three cities in the US, the standalone app (which doesn't integrate with a car's infotainment system) will also function in Las Vegas, Arcadia and Walnut Creek in California, and Christchurch, New Zealand, with more cities planned for the near future.

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