Learning from Highway Mayhem

I’m a sucker for a good dashcam video.?Youtube knows this and regularly feeds me Russian dashcam and police chase recordings.?I have been profiled.

This week I discovered a bottomless repository of such videos on Nexar’s Facebook page.?Nexar is a several-year-old Israeli startup with its roots in the driving app business, but which has branched out into dashcams.

As a purveyor of dashcams, Nexar has found new life in the realm of driving data encompassing open parking space identification, road sign recognition, road work zone detection, and insurance.?As COVID-19 lockdowns lift and consumers return to highways and streets, the world is witnessing a corresponding return to traffic crashes and fatalities.

The U.S. has been hit especially hard as overall fatalities have counter-intuitively risen in the wake of the pandemic – less driving-more crashes? – suggesting that maybe we have all lost some of our driving skills during our extended period of sheltering in place.?To make matters worse, or at least more interesting, the nature of driving has been fundamentally altered by the pandemic.

Mobility services – such as scooters, car sharing, ride hailing, and electric bikes – that nose dived over a year ago at the outset of the pandemic, have surged back stronger than before.?Regulations limiting the use of scooters and bikes in metropolitan areas have eased – driving demand and an accelerated expansion.

At the same time, food, meal, and parcel delivery services relying on both two-wheel and four-wheel vehicles have seen an explosion fundamentally altering the mix of vehicles and increasing the challenges facing returning car drivers.?This transformation is on vivid display on Nexar’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/CapturedWithNexar) where users of Nexar dashcams share their videos.

To be sure, there are also videos of found lost dogs, streaking meteors, and windblown, flying trampolines.?But the “money shot” for a dashcam is a crash – or a near-crash - and there are a disturbingly large number of these.

Visiting the Nexar Facebook page will rebalance your view of safe driving in the U.S. or the lack of it.?Clearly Eastern Europe has no monopoly on bad driving behavior.?What really caught my eye, though, is the sheer number of crashes involving two-wheel vehicles – often involving people clearly working for delivery apps.

This reality highlights a rarely discussed aspect of the urban two-wheel delivery business.?It is a dangerous business that is contributing an entirely new element to the existing set of driving challenges in the post-COVID streetscape.

These mishaps between cars and bikes appear to be a mix of intentional and unintentional events.?In the case of intentional crashes, which might involve fraud, the drivers sharing their dashcam videos on the Nexar page are quick to note their relief that they have the video to back up their blamelessness.

The larger opportunity reflected in these videos, though, is the ability to help autonomous vehicle developers better anticipate the kind of driving behavior evolving on streets and highways.?Nexar is gathering massive amounts of this kind of data and working with autonomous vehicle developers to help them prepare their systems for the real world by providing the corner cases required for AI training - including collisions, near-misses and other strange driving events.

The Nexar Facebook page can be frightening and reassuring and downright heartwarming.?It’s worth a visit to learn more about what Nexar is up to since pivoting to dashcams and built-in applications.