How black ice accidents can be prevented - a personal experience
It was a cold but beautiful day end of March in 2007, when I drove to my Bosch office in Plymouth, Michigan. My first born son - at that time 5 years old - sat in the back seat and was excited about another great day in pre-school.
I consider myself an experienced driver and already had passed several driver trainings at that time. I was not even driving fast, but when I approached the first intersection and started to decelerate by applying the brakes on my X-Type .... nothing happened.
As I grew up in Germany, I only heard about black ice situations but never had exeprienced this dangerous road conditions before. Please have a look at the picture: Would you have classified this road as slippery? Thanks to a fast reaction and some luck, I was able to prevent an intersection collision by steering to the left ending up in a dig. My son took it easy, but still remembers this event up to now. Since then I was looking for technologies that can warn us drivers in advance to adapt our speed and/or our path planning accordingly. And if you think that this only can happen in Michigan, I need to add that after my return to Germany there were at least 2 more slippery road conditions I wasn't expecting (thankfully with no accidents involved).
I'm blessed to work for a company that has introduced a vison of zero accidents for a long time. Airbags, ABS (Anti Brake Systems), ESC (Electronic Stability Control) and AEB (Automatic Emergency Braking) are only some of the more prominent examples that make our lives on roads more save.
In 2018, BOSCH announced a road condition alert service for self-driving vehicles. I'm very proud that now 14 years after my accident the project team that worked hard and with lots of dedication and enthusiasm to launch this service, has joined the newly founded XC (Cross-domain computing solutions) division in January 2021.
As self-driving vehicles are still in the proof-of-concept phase and will take a while until we see more of them, it is our goal to make this technology accessible to every OEM and vehicle produced.
When I shared my black ice experience in the next days in our neighborhood I was not surprised that 2 more had a critical situation at the same intersection just minutes before my accident happened. How much would you be willing to pay for this service? Would you be willing to share your in-vehicle data to warn the driver who is next?
Head of Development Commercial Vehicles / Strategy Execution
3 年This kind of safety services should be a standard in smart modern cars to improve the road safety.
Executive Administrative Assistant
3 年Good to know you are safe from those incidents! So proud to have been able to call you a colleague. I have an ESP story too.
Driving Digital Transformation ? Digital Transformation in Automated Driving
3 年Interestingly most of us have similar stories to share (mine would be a frightening accident on snowy road with my parents when I was a kid. At the time it made me believe I'd never want to drive a car myself.) Proves that this is very common! And rationally it's not only a threat of life, but even for every ditch and scratch at least an absolute waste of time and money. Willing to pay? Absolutely. In fact, it's time for insurance companies to incentivize these technologies on a broad scale, because they reduce risk (from a time, money and health perspective). That's an absolute business case.