With an aim to improve road safety live on the roads while we travel, top car manufacturers BMW, Ford, Volvo and Mercedes have announced new plans to issue cars with safety alert systems.
These new plans will see cars processing alerts and sending them over to a shared cloud database, and will be accessible to all members of the proposed scheme. For instance, motorists who drive a Mercedes will have access to live road alerts from BMW cars, providing a larger pool of information for drivers encountering road problems and safety hazards, such as icy roads, heavy fog and even road collisions, working much like a radio traffic alert system.
Christoph Grote, BMW’s Senior Vice-President, said “We are proud to blaze this trail with our partners. When it comes to road safety, there are no competitors, only partners.”
Volvo has announced from 2020, all of its cars will share safety information with other cars, too, and are actively urging other car manufacturers to follow in their footsteps – for a safer driving experience overall. Volvo’s plans will stem from the Volvo Hazard Light Alert system, which has been designed to alert other drivers immediately when another motorist activates their hazard warning lights. These signals will then translate into warnings for other road users, confirming locations where low-grip and slippery conditions have been raised, using the Slippery Road Alert System.
With such great access to and advances in technology, new plans to implement this road safety warning technique will soon be underway and will improve safety in more ways than one. For instance, drivers will be further discouraged to use their phone while driving to report a hazard on the roads. Instead, they will simply have to hit their hazard warning lights or let the car detect these issues instead.
Håkan Samuelsson, Volvo CEO said: “We think this type of anonymised data sharing should be done for free, for the greater good and to the wider benefit of society. It saves lives, time and taxpayer money.”
Keep checking the Anglo Liners’ blog each week to stay up-to-date with the week’s latest road safety news, or click here for a free quote.