A COLLISION-FREE WORLD WHERE EVERYONE GETS HOME SAFELY

In the first of a trio of articles on road safety innovation, Intertraffic gets the ball rolling with HAAS Alert’s Director of Strategy and Business Development for Europe, Gareth Evans.

HAAS Alert's mission is to build lifesaving mobility solutions to make vehicles and roads safer and smarter. The ultimate vision is a connected, collision-free world where everyone gets home safely. That’s some ambition, but this company is doing their utmost to make it a reality.

Chicago-based HAAS Alert aims to make roads and communities safer by delivering real-time digital alerts from emergency response, municipal and private fleets, work zones, and connected infrastructure to nearby drivers through their innovative Safety Cloud®, the only in-vehicle communication platform. It is, in simple terms, a collision prevention service.

Road Safety Solutions in the Cloud

Safety Cloud digital alerting notifies drivers through the vehicle’s infotainment system and navigation apps when they're approaching active roadside incidents and hazards, providing advance warning up to 30 seconds in advance. Available on millions of vehicles and mobile devices, Safety Cloud digital alerts prevent distracted driving, protect vulnerable road users, and help fleets, cities, and agencies achieve Vision Zero and Safe Systems objectives. So how did it all start? What was the catalyst?

“It started when our founder and CEO, Cory Hohs,” says Gareth, “was on his way to work on a motorcycle and nearly got hit by an ambulance. One of the first ideas that he had was to see if there was a way to increase the audible noise for sirens into a bike helmet. And here we are.”

Our founder was on his way to work on a motorcycle and nearly got hit by an ambulance. One of the first ideas that he had was to see if there was a way to increase the audible noise for sirens into a bike helmet

“We live in a world where people that are distracted,” he continues. “Vehicles are designed so you're in your own personal bubble, and people are more distracted than ever. When Cory and the rest of the co-founders really started to look into this in the US, they saw that there's a huge problem with emergency service personnel, or first responders, getting killed and seriously injured at the side of the road. It’s a huge issue and yet year on year, there's not a massive improvement. So our view is, if lights, sirens, highways, jackets and cones all worked perfectly, we wouldn't exist. But unfortunately, in that respect, we do.”

Evans and his HAAS Alert (and no, HAAS isn’t strictly an acronym, it’s more of a corporate nod to its aforementioned founder’s experience and surname) colleagues in the UK and US have distilled what they do into a convenient sentence: interrupting the distracted driver and get their attention on the road, giving them a clear indication of what is coming up ahead.

“We see on two sides of the road safety element,” Gareth explains. “It's helping and supporting the men and women that are operating on the road, that are using the road, and then also the general public as well. Of course, we are helping first responders with breakdown, recovery, work zones and so on, but we also provide alerts, such as weather notifications. We're doing some projects in the United States with wrong way driving alerts. So, actually alerting someone that there's a wrong way driver heading in their direction.”

First responders getting killed and seriously injured at the side of the road is a huge issue and yet year on year there's not a massive improvement

The All-Important Half-Minute

“What we aren't there for is that last minute decision that a vehicle needs to make. So we're not a typical ADAS system,” Gareth insists. “The alerts are there to give someone that 30 seconds heads up in advance that there is ‘x’ up ahead or there is ‘y’ queuing behind you, so they can adjust their driving behaviour, or at least pay attention and be more focused in those really important 30 seconds.”

The obvious question now is the simplest of all: how does it work? How does the message or the alert get to the driver, and what does the driver hear or see?

“We have data that is input into our cloud in a few different ways. So we have our own hardware that we can put into an emergency service vehicle, etc, which is what we call HA-7. Or we can integrate with partners such as telematics companies, partners that are maybe already connected in emergency vehicles,” he says. “We take data feeds, for example, from National Highways in the UK and we're tapping into the NAPCORE data. On the whole, the connectivity that we have is is through cellular coverage, basically CV2X. The data comes into our Safety Cloud platform and essentially what we are doing, although it sounds very simple, is actually really complex, but we are determining, what and where those alerts are by the data feeds that we receive.”

The data comes into our Safety Cloud platform and essentially what we are doing is determining, what and where those alerts are by the data feeds that we receive

The Pure Mathematics of Road Safety

However, the HAAS Alert approach to road safety and, ultimately, saving lives, goes even deeper, as Gareth elucidates.

“We also do the calculations and provide the mechanism to make sure those vehicles, those navigation apps, are getting the right alert at the right time. We do all of that in our cloud infrastructure.

“We describe ourselves as a safety company and that we do very, very complex stuff, but we make it very easy for car manufacturers to put an alert in their vehicle. Neither are we just collecting data and sending it to the OEM. The OEMs are challenged, because globally, they've got different data feeds, they've got different data formats, they've got different priorities. So by creating these alerts and giving them the mechanism to produce them in their vehicles, we are forming part of that value chain.”
 

The OEMs are challenged, because globally, they've got different data feeds, they've got different data formats, they've got different priorities

Alert Status: Red

“We’re live with VW, Stellantis and Skoda, and whether you have got your navigation on or not, you would get an alert in the vehicle. So this would override your radio and your navigation with a small visual and audio prompt. It’s typically a two-tone chime, and if you're listening to a radio, it'll lower the volume slightly. With VW and Stellantis [including Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Jeep and Opel] models it comes up on the entertainment screen, but how this actually appears in a vehicle is very much dependent on the OEMs and also their capability.”

Is data still considered to be the new oil or the new gold? Whatever its current epithet, data is the dominant force in any solution that is designed to not only drastically reduce serious crashes but to keep people alive.

Says Gareth: “There is not a data issue. There's data everywhere, and we've seen this by looking at some of the national access points. Just because there's lots of data, doesn't mean it's good data. One of our first priorities is to work out if can we be connected to the asset that might be generating a hazard on the roadway? So are we directly connected to an ambulance, a fire truck, police car, tow truck, work zone vehicle? Because what that does, it takes away all ambiguity. We know exactly where that vehicle is, and we know if it wants to alert or not. Does it have its blue lights and sirens going? We know that categorically.

There's data everywhere, and we've seen this by looking at some of the national access points. Just because there's lots of data, doesn't mean it's good data

“We've got a massive responsibility to the people that we're trying to protect, both the emergency services and the general road user. We've also got a huge responsibility to the car makers to make sure that they are getting accurate data and alerts into their vehicles. If you're driving your new Skoda and you get a series of bad alerts, you complain to Skoda, you do not complain to HAAS Alert because you probably don't know who we are. And if you're getting a series of bad alerts in Wayze, you complain to Wayze. So we have a huge responsibility to our partners to make sure that what we are giving them is very accurate and responsive.”

“If you’re on the way to the supermarket and your car has beeped at you 17 times that there's a hazard and you don't see one of them, you are not going to have any trust in the system. So our view is, if you have a car that has digital alerts enabled and you never, ever get one, that’s fantastic, because you've never needed it. You don’t consider your airbag or seatbelt as a waste of money because you have never had to use them! That's what we hope for a digital alert,” Gareth concludes.

“When you actually get an alert, you know that it's a critical safety situation, and it's given you very valid information of what's coming up on the road ahead.”

Visitors to Intertraffic Amsterdam in March will have opportunity to hear the HAAS Alert point of view when the company presents its paper: “30 seconds to Safer Roads for Everybody: Responder-Activated Alerts for Proactive Driver Response”.