With the help of state-of-the-art vehicle sensors, thousands of accidents involving pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists have already been prevented in the test area of Barcelona (Munich, November 24th 2021) – Human error is responsible for the majority of accidents. With the worldwide unique project “Autonomous Ready” of the Spanish traffic authority Dirección General de Tráfico (DGT) and the city of Barcelona, up to 80 % of driving errors can be predicted thanks to advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). The automotive data company CARFAX supports the project as a partner with sensors for 150 vehicles. The interim results of the project are promising. For Autonomous Ready, more than 460 transport and delivery vehicles, in the Catalan capital Barcelona have so far been equipped with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), i.e. driving assistants and data sensors from Intel company Mobileye. Between October 2020 and 2021 alone, Autonomous Ready, which launched in October 2019, warned drivers of around 440,000 potential collisions and likely avoided several hundred fatal accidents. In total, the equipped vehicles detected about 1.5 million bicyclists and nearly 17 million pedestrians during the previously mentioned period, alerting of potential accidents with nearly 8.400 bicyclists and 74.000 pedestrians. This underlines the importance of the assistance systems, as drivers alone are no longer able to detect this enormous number of people on the road. CARFAX will equip a total of 150 vehicles in Barcelona with the modern assistance and data systems. In doing so, CARFAX wants to make its contribution to supporting “Vision Zero”. The goal of Vision Zero is to ensure that no more people are seriously injured or killed in road accidents. Currently, eight out of ten traffic fatalities in cities are pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists. “The ambition of DGT’s Autonomous Ready project is the same as ours: to make Europe’s roads safer. We didn’t think twice about supporting this project and the first results show that such assistance systems can make an important contribution to getting closer to Vison Zero. We are all the more pleased that the project has been extended for another year,” explains Marco Arban, Business Development Director of CARFAX in Europe. The systems themselves consist of advanced, intelligent cameras as well as a powerful data tool that can analyze the vehicle’s environment in real time and help drivers avoid accidents. In addition to protecting the vulnerable road, the systems also analyze the flow of traffic and can thus provide early warning of dangerous situations. Once the project has been completed, the findings will be used in other cities.
