ILC ARTICLE

Motor Claims Festival, The all-seeing Mobileye

3rd July 2020

The penultimate session of the first digital I Love Claims Motor Festival introduced attendees to an ADAS tech company that despite being ubiquitous within the global car parc has largely gone under the radar.

Described by I Love Claims as the ‘Industry’s Best Kept Secret’, Mobileye was founded in Israel in 1999. Its technology is now fitted in more than 50 million vehicles, across more than 25 vehicle manufacturers, and its $15.3bn acquisition by Intel in 2017 contributed four per cent to Israel’s total GDP that year.

Powered by a single lens camera fitted to the windscreen, its advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) include lane, vehicle, pedestrian and blind spot detection, while the technology also includes five life-saving features: a speed limit indicator displays the road speed limit and alerts the driver if they’re exceeding it; a forward collision warning sounds an alert up to three seconds before a potential rear-end collision; a pedestrian and cyclist alert warning gives the driver up to 2.1 seconds warning; a lane departure warning alerts the driver if they are changing lanes without signalling; while headway monitoring helps to prevent tailgating by sounding an alert if the gap to the vehicle in front becomes too small.

Preventative

Mobileye’s Greg Weingarten said, ‘This is a preventative tool that works in real-time and helps to change driver behaviour – because you don’t want to be constantly told you’re not driving well.’

With the added benefit of being suitable for retrofit, the technology has already delivered huge cost savings to commercial fleets. Universal Tyre & Autocentres reported a substantial drop in the number of collisions and a 50% reduction in average claims costs after fitting the technology, while Abellio saw avoidable collisions decrease by nearly a third, with a 60% reduction in passenger injuries.

Mapping

However, Mobileye is now casting its eyes forward to future mobility needs, and is leveraging its ADAS technology to offer Road Asset Mapping functionality.

Essentially, the vehicles utilising its built-in or retrofitted technology collect millions of miles of road data, which is then uploaded to the cloud to generate an ever-evolving and self-updating view of assets on or near the road.

This includes, but is not restricted to, traffic signs and lights, tree trunks, manholes, road markings, lane width, road edges and street elevation.

These assets can be filtered, allowing companies to access the data that is relevant to them.

Northumbrian Water Group provides an insightful case study. It manages 15,000 miles of water mains and 18,000 miles of sewers. Tracking the health of its network and ensuring its maps are up to date is expensive and time-consuming. However, since installing Mobileye’s asset mapping technology in its vehicles it has ‘mapped’ 5.8 million road features, enabling its fleet to operate far more efficiently and respond quicker to issues.

Smart Cities

But this is just one small area Mobileye’s road mapping technology can be employed.

As cities evolve into ‘smart’ cities offering Mobility as a Service (MaaS), their reliance on multi-layered and real-time data around transport networks will be critical.

In this sense, Mobileye technology can be employed in two ways – helping drivers to avoid collisions while at the same time collecting data to enable authorities to make their roads safer.

For example, the technology can track average speeds on individual roads, it can monitor the volume of pedestrians on the pavements and what times in the day that volume spikes.

Collision hotspots

It can identify the intersections which are collision hotspots, but, more than that, it can also alert authorities to near-miss areas by monitoring harsh cornering or braking – information which could help them improve relevant road signage.

Able to function in all weathers, it can even tell operators where the pot-holes are on the road network, and which ones are the most severe.

Greg said, ‘The idea is that cities will use this data to improve road safety. They can also overlay the data sets, like bike lane usage and peak periods of travel, to compile high-risk scores, and help prepare for autonomous vehicles.’

The ILC Digital Motor Claims Festival is supported by Headline Sponsor – Enterprise Rent-A-Car, along with Corporate Partners: AkzoNobel; Autoglass; Carpenters Group; Copart; e2e; Enterprise Rent-A-Car; GT Motive; The Green Parts Specialists; Innovation Group; Keoghs; SureTrak; S&G Response; and thingco.