Technology: Getting Their Trucks in a Row, Europeans Revisit the Convoy

Researchers in Europe are working on a concept that will be familiar to anyone who has seen films about the bands of travelers who settled the American West. The project is developing an electronic communications system that enables a wagon train of tractor-trailer trucks and cars to make semiautonomous road trips possible — without the complexity of efforts like Google’s driverless vehicles.

The Volvos — both the car and truck companies, that is, which have different owners — call the idea “platooning” and see it as a bridge to traveling by driverless cars. It may look as simple as a pack of Nascar drivers strung together for a 200-mile-an-hour draft at Talladega, but this bridge is years away and faces challenges.

Rather than the increased speeds that are the incentive for nose-to-tail spacing on the racetrack, the goal of platooning is to reduce accidents caused by driver error.

Erik Coelingh, senior technical leader for safety and driver support technology at Volvo Car in Sweden, said in an interview that his group participated last year in successful tests involving a semitrailer that led another truck and three cars on European tracks and roads. The tests were part of a project called Safe Road Trains for the Environment, or Sartre, financed by the European Commission.

Drivers in vehicles outfitted with radar and laser systems that inform the adaptive cruise control, emergency braking and lane-departure systems, as well as video cameras, pulled in behind a moving semi. After getting the leader’s permission, the cars and truck linked wirelessly, and computers took over.

While the lead truck driver guided them, drivers in the following vehicles — each 12 feet apart — relinquished control. Alerts about emergency maneuvers were passed instantly through the platoon.

Fuel economy increased 10 percent to 20 percent, according to participants, because airflow behind a long, tapered shape creates less fuel-gobbling turbulence.

Asked about the system’s commercial viability, Mr. Coelingh did not mince words: “We’re not there yet.”

He said it could be a decade before platooning became a reality.

Volvo’s platoon research involves mostly technology that automakers already offer, as well as solutions expected in coming years,, including vehicle-to-vehicle computer communication. Installing that equipment in a new vehicle today, Mr. Coelingh said, would add about $5,300 to the sticker price. That includes redundant systems in case primary systems fail.

According to Mr. Coelingh, the project was started to answer questions about making driving safer. “But we’ve come up with a lot more questions,” he said.

Then there’s the interval between vehicles. Twelve feet might be too tight.

Volvo researchers found that at that distance, at highway speeds, even the computers couldn’t always read the lane markings needed to position vehicles. It also resulted in truck tires firing road grit into the radiator of the car behind the lead truck.

Intervals can be extended, but that cuts fuel savings, Mr. Coelingh said.

Crime Scene: The Storm Took Their Cars, Then Thieves Disabled the New Ones

Hurricane Sandy wiped out nearly all of the thousands of cars in the Queens neighborhood of Howard Beach when waves of brackish seawater rolled up the streets. Residents who remembered past floods had moved their cars to the higher ground near Public School 146, but even those were not spared. The morning after the storm, people stepped outside to find their vehicles — many homes had at least two — on their neighbors’ lawns or bumped up against a tree half a block way. Ignitions were cranked. The engines that turned over that day were dead soon after, done in by the saltwater.

That’s when the checks arrived. “Everyone went out and got brand new cars,” Officer Kenneth T. Zorn of the Police Department said.

One of those new cars belonged to Jonathan Rubin, 23, who lost an Infiniti in the storm and splurged on an expensive replacement. He outfitted his new Infiniti G37 sedan with expensive, gunmetal-gray rims. He put not one, but four wheel locks on the car, one for each tire.

“I work hard for what I get,” he said, calling the car his pride and joy. His father, Saul David Rubin, 53, shook his head and said, “He loves that car more than, I would say, people.”

The son said: “After Sandy, everything started pointing upward. Everything started getting better.”

On March 5, he woke up early for his job selling Red Bull to restaurants and bodegas and stepped outside his family’s home on 79th Street to find his beloved sedan sitting on concrete blocks. The four wheels were gone. He retreated back to the house, and — in old-school storybook fashion — he reached for a baseball bat first, in case the thieves were lurking. Then the phone, to call the police.

There have been at least eight cases of brand-new tires being stolen in the neighborhood this year. The police at the 106th Precinct called a community meeting in February, seeking to publicize the pattern. The local paper, The Forum, covered the meeting, with the publisher, Patricia Adams, writing the article herself.

So she was well aware of what had happened when on March 5 she, too, stepped outside her home and found her post-storm Infiniti up on blocks.

“It’s a problem that’s really epic,” she said.

Surveillance videos from a nearby house showed how the thieves stole Mr. Rubin’s tires, though they did not deliver clear images of their faces.

“Between five and seven guys,” Mr. Rubin said, in two cars, could be seen parking near his house. One man acted as a lookout. The thieves stole blocks from his neighbor’s yard, and wedged them beneath the Infiniti’s body about midway between the front and rear tires. They disabled the wheel locks quickly enough, let the air out of the tires and pulled off the wheels. They tossed them into one of the cars and drove away, leaving the car balancing there like a seesaw. It took about half an hour.

Deputy Inspector Tom Pascale said auto-related thefts had long been an issue in Howard Beach, with its proximity to getaway routes like the Belt Parkway. The thieves work in the rain, which tempers whatever noise they make, striking around 1 a.m. The spike in tire thefts is not isolated to Howard Beach; similar crimes have been reported throughout Queens. The 2013 Honda Accord is a popular target, Inspector Pascale said.

Ms. Adams said her house’s motion-detector spotlights — “My house lights up like a runway as soon as you step on my property” — had been disabled. A friend who installs alarms said a device like a laser pointer aimed at the light’s sensor would disarm it. Ms. Adams said the lookout communicated with the other thieves by walkie-talkie.

A friend of Mr. Rubin’s called him recently and said he had seen rims like his for sale on Craigslist. “I texted the kid,” he said. He said he and the police separately contacted the seller, who sent pictures of rims that were not his.

He is waiting for his car to come back from the shop, with new rims, the same expensive kind. And a better alarm. “When you touch it with your pinkie, it goes off,” he said.

The police have taken to watching for new cars, especially Accords, and knocking on their owners’ doors to preach caution.

“It’s known,” Mr. Rubin’s father, Saul, said, “that if you get a new car, you’re going to get hit.”

E-mail: crimescene@nytimes.com Twitter: @mwilsonnyt