Building Community around Safety

An unusual reception was hosted by Newlab at Michigan Central last week. City and state officials from across Michigan came together to announce new deployments of digital alerting capabilities from HAAS Alert's Safety Cloud application.

The event was unusual for the fact that it related to automobiles in the North American home of automotive technology but no car makers were featured in the multiple panel discussions. Cities, states, and the federal government are all wrestling with the terrible toll taken annually on U.S. highways (100 lives lost daily) and globally (3,700/day) and yet auto makers have almost universally decided to keep their distance from these discussions.

Arguably Stellantis and Volkswagen ought to have joined the reception held to acknowledge new Safety Cloud deployments across Michigan. Both Stellantis and Volkswagen have admirably made the decision to integrate the Safety Cloud application in their vehicles.

Safety cloud delivers real-time alerts to drivers regarding upcoming roadway hazards including responding emergency vehicles and work zones. The new deployments announced at the event included:

• The Michigan Department of Transportation activating Safety Cloud on a mixture of public safety and roadway maintenance vehicles including State Patrol vehicles, snow plows, work zone assets, and public transit buses. The state is also developing workforce training resources on the installation and operation of digital alerting technology to pave the way for streamlining and standardizing future deployments.

• The city of Dearborn announced it is activating Safety Cloud on 300 city vehicles and assets including fire trucks, police vehicles, ambulances, and public works vehicles. As part of broader smart city initiatives prioritized by Dearborn Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud, Safety Cloud digital alerting will enhance safety for city workers and citizens and enable data-driven improvements in city fleet operations and road design over time.

The key message conveyed by HAAS Alert is that drivers must move out of the path of responding emergency vehicles AND must move over (as decreed by laws in all 50 U.S. states) to avoid emergency vehicles parked by the side of the road. Millions of Stellantis and Volkswagen vehicles are now equipped with the alerting capability and hundreds of thousands of emergency responder vehicles are equipped to transmit their location information to the HAAS Alert Safety Cloud.

Speaking at the Newlab event were:

• Garlin Gilchrist, Lieutenant Governor of the State of Michigan
• Justine Johnson, Chief Mobility Officer of the State of Michigan
• Bradley Wieferich, Director of the Michigan Department of Transportation 
• The Hon. Abullah H. Hammoud, Mayor of Dearborn, Michigan
• Chuck Simms, Detroit Executive Fire Commissioner 
• Ned Staebler, VP of Economic Development at Wayne State University and President of TechTown
• Justin Onwenu, Director of Entrepreneurship and Economic Opportunity at the City of Detroit

HAAS Alert's Safety Cloud is just one piece of two-way life-saving effort - one focused on preventing crashes and one focused on recovering from and surviving crashes - that are working simultaneously to attack the ongoing trauma of highway fatalities. The crash survival and recovery effort is fittingly led by the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration with private sector support from first responder agencies, telematics service providers (notably including General Motors' OnStar), and RoadMedic, a cloud based data delivery platform intended to accelerate crash response.

The strange and enduring reality is the lack of leadership from auto makers. This lack of participation and thought leadership was most glaring at the Newlab event which ought to have presented a golden opportunity for any single car maker or a group of car makers to embrace the concept of data sharing in the interest of safety and crash avoidance.

Of course, the event was occurring just days after Texas State Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit against Allstate's Airity division for gathering and selling consumer driving data without proper consent in violation of state privacy laws. The Newlab event also preceded by two days General Motors' settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in which the car maker agreed not to collect, share, or sell consumer location data without proper consumer consent with the possible exception of emergency response circumstances.

HAAS Alert and RoadMedic ought to be considered as outside the scope of both of those legal actions. HAAS Alert's Safety Cloud is focused on communicating data to private vehicles that is coming from public service vehicles or workzone infrastructure - i.e. detour or arrow signs. RoadMedic's cloud-based application orchestrates the communication of crash-related data including:

• Occupant Details: Number and location of occupants.
• Impact and Injury Severity: Data to assess the crash's impact and injury severity.
• Incident Location: Precise GPS coordinates.
• Extrication Instructions: Vehicle-specific rescue guidelines.
• Driver Biometrics: Health data to assist in triage.

The Newlab event was a reminder that auto makers have work to do in refining their messaging around collision avoidance and crash response. Consumers should be advised to opt in to data sharing platforms such as HAAS Alert and RoadMedic. Whether in seeking to prevent crashes or recover from them, there is essentially no way that the data shared from either of these solutions could be used against drivers or vehicle owners. Too many lives are being lost. It's time for auto makers to take a more prominent stance.