Renault Techs are working on a way to help reduce car accidents
Ask anyone why there are so many accidents on our roads and the answer will be Taxis!!!! Sure, minibus taxis often drive badly, but the causes of road accidents and deaths are much more nuanced. In fact, the leading causes are distractions, drunk driving and speeding, and behaviours that are not limited to taxis. This is a worldwide problem…
So let’s look at Renault in India and the hackathon it will carry out to solve hackcidents. In case you don’t know what hackzactly we are talking about, let’s take a step back. A hackathon is like a marathon for technical people and computer fundis to solve a problem using technology. A famous example was when Facebook had such a ‘thon and came up with the ‘Like’ button. In this case, it is to solve accidents involving a specific type of vehicle in a specific area.
In Tamil Nadu, a region in India, over 10% of road deaths are caused by public buses, twice the national average. So the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) has signed an agreement with Renault-Nissan Technology and Business Centre to carry out a year-long hackathon to find out why these accidents are so prevalent in that area, and to evaluate technology solutions to reduce the accidents.
Initially, it was assumed that speeding was responsible for this high accident prevalence, but a 2019 project by the Indian government to install speed warnings in all consumer vehicles in the country was deemed to be ineffective, a one-size-fits-all attempt to improve road safety. But if you have such a statistically-significant accident rate variance, there have to be other factors as well.
The first part of this project will be to fit buses in the affected regions with sensors, to collect data on why these fatal accidents occur. The next part of the project will be to use the data to develop low-cost technologies to solve the problem.
Contextualised speed warnings may be a solution to consider for the engineers at Renault-Nissan. This uses publicly-available road infrastructure and geographical information to tell the driver he’s going too fast for the road he is on. On some roads, at certain times it is fine to drive at 60km/h, while on others it is not.
We will see what solutions the Renault boffins come up with in about a year’s time, but in the meantime, you can keep up with all Renault-related news by staying up to date with our blog.
