What is "Mercedes-Benz Road Safety Dashboard"?

Vehicle data can save lives – Mercedes-Benz is now taking the next decisive step: London is one of the first European cities to research how data from vehicles, starting with data from Mercedes-Benz driver assistance systems Benz, make city streets safer for everyone.

The Mercedes-Benz Road Safety Dashboard was developed together with Transport for London and a team from the Urban Mobility Solutions (UMS) division of Mercedes-Benz AG. This digital tool can highlight potential danger spots within the city before an accident occurs.

Currently, cities and government agencies use information about crashes and incidents that have occurred on their roads to understand road safety and identify hazards. However, this always means that there have already been serious incidents in that country, writes "hanser-automotive", the Telegraph reports.

Daniel Deparis, Head of Urban Mobility Solutions at Mercedes-Benz AG and Rikesh Shah, Head of Commercial Innovation at Transport for London, have joined forces to work together to exploit this innovative solution.

The first talks with representatives from London took place in 2019. Since then, engineers, security experts, data protection specialists and data analysts from London and from Mercedes-Benz have worked together intensively and very successfully.

Road safety in the urban environment

"Together with Transport for London and our experts, we started this innovative program for more traffic safety and have now been able to complete the development phase," says Daniel Deparis, Head of Urban Mobility Solutions at Mercedes-Benz.

"We are committed to our Vision Zero strategy, which aims to remove all serious and fatal accidents from London's roads by 2041. The collaboration with Mercedes-Benz is helping us develop new data-driven technologies that will bring us closer to this goal,” says Rikesh Shah, Head of Commercial Innovation at Transport for London.

Information from driver assistance systems

The "Mercedes-Benz Road Safety Dashboard" is based on individual messages from the driver assistance systems that are already available in almost all Mercedes-Benz model series. The systems can intervene in many dangerous situations on the road and also reduce the severity of potential collisions or even avoid them altogether.

Based on individual reports at the same GPS position, potential accident black spots are automatically identified and analyzed using an intelligent algorithm developed by Mercedes-Benz engineers.

Additional data from transport infrastructure

Anonymous vehicle data from assistance systems has been enriched with additional data from the City of London. This includes existing traffic infrastructure such as traffic lights or zebra crossings, information on accidents that have already occurred and the density of vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians. This makes it visible on the dashboard where action needs to be taken.

The focus is mainly on the most vulnerable road users: pedestrians and cyclists. Dangerous situations in areas around schools, kindergartens and universities have been monitored particularly closely in London.

Functionality of "Mercedes-Benz Road Safety Dashboard"

Thanks to sensors such as ultrasound, radars, and stereo cameras, the objects that can be detected in the surrounding environment of the car are: cars moving forward, passing, approaching from behind or even cars coming in front and which are in the detection range - but also pedestrians, road signs and different types of traffic signs.

If there is an acoustic and visual warning or autonomous emergency braking, this information is sent to the system "cloud” of Mercedes-Benz and remains anonymous. /Telegraph/