WayCare: Making Money by Saving Lives

"Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it," is a quote frequently attributed to American humorist Mark Twain, but believed to have been coined by his neighbor and editor of the Hartford Courant Charles Dudley Warner. In a similar vein, everybody talks about highway fatalities, but nobody does anything about that either.

A tiny Israeli startup hopes to change that.

WayCare is working with multiple municipalities in Israel, Canada and the U.S. to find ways to predict crashes before they happen and maybe prevent them altogether. WayCare's CEO says the company has already tested its prediction rate on Ayalon Highway, Israel’s busiest urban highway.

"In our evaluation we ran our platform against all crashes that occurred in 2015 in Ayalon (~1,500) of which our platform predicted over 70% accurately, two hours before the crash occurred," said Noam Maitel of WayCare. WayCare is in the midst of setting up pilots in the U.S.

The significance of WayCare's work is hard to underestimate given the rising death toll on U.S. highways. WayCare's competitive set includes a wide range of companies across the globe that are either gathering data or analyzing data.

In all my travels around the automotive industry I have never seen, heard or discovered a company coming at the problem like WayCare. The company is developing a machine learning platform for ingesting and analyzing traffic and crash data with a decision support platform designed to advise road authorities as to the tactics they might employ to prevent predicted crashes.

WayCare New Jersey platform prototype

Car companies and wireless carriers are increasingly collecting vehicle data for the purposes of developing predictive traffic models or customer relationship solutions. But I've yet to find any connected car solution designed to put powerful analytic tools into the hands of local transportation executives.

Companies like TomTom have, in the recent past, identified crash hotspots and have highlighted those areas in their navigation maps. But WayCare is working with more dynamic information and actually predicting crash events.

The WayCare solution reminds me of Palantir's model for leveraging a range of data sets for predicting criminal activity. Municipalities that have made use of Palantir in law enforcement applications have gone so far as to dispatch police officers to neighborhoods where criminal activity is foreseen by Palantir's models.

Palantir's data modeling and analytics have been applied across a wide range of industries, according to the company's Website:

Notably absent from the roster of Palantir applications is automobile crashes or traffic. Palantir's algorithms are put to work in the insurance industry, but it is unclear as to whether this is life, health, auto or home insurance.

For that matter, you can add car insurance companies to the roster of organizations - including the U.S. Department of Transportation - that have failed to take advantage of big data analytics. The USDOT's approach is to make its vast data troves available for others to analyze. What is missing is an action plan and decision support for putting the resulting analysis to work to mitigate the daily carnage on U.S. highways.

Insurance companies, such as State Farm, have attempted to identify car crash hotspots, but, again, what is missing is an ongoing engagement with a decision support platform as provided by WayCare. WayCare's business model is software as a service (SaaS) with a one-time implementation fee and multi-year contract.

The most amazing thing to me is that all the Microsoft's and IBM's and Alphabet's of the world have failed to identify this market opportunity. Alphabet is perhaps the most obvious failure of vision given its analytics credentials and its in-vehicle presence in the form of Waze and Googlemaps. Perhaps Alphabet is too interested in distracting drivers to help them stay out of trouble.

Wireless carriers, too, have failed to figure this proposition out - though they are working on it in partnership with analytics firms like Teralytics and others. Perhaps most vulnerable to criticism, though, are car makers. Car makers have access to all the data necessary to tell them the early indicators of an imminent crash but have failed to connect these dots.

BMW and General Motors' OnStar have used data from vehicle crashes to create their now-famous severity algorithms - to inform first responders of the forces involved in a given crash and the potential for severe internal injuries and/or the need for urgent evacuation of crash victims. In the future, driver monitoring systems are likely to be built with driver alerts and other means of intervention to prevent negative consequences. Collision avoidance today in cars boils down to radar- and camera-based systems which are should be informed as to the crash history or proclivity of a particular stretch of road.

Until the wireless carriers, the car insurance companies, the auto makers and the USDOT can find a way to cooperate over sharing and analyzing driving data, we will all be dependent on the algorithmic adventures of WayCare to save lives on highways around the world. If nothing else, WayCare has flagged up this issue - which costs the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars - as a worthy are of endeavor.

Roger C. Lanctot is Associate Director in the Global Automotive Practice at Strategy Analytics. More details about Strategy Analytics can be found here: https://www.strategyanalytics.com/access-services/automotive#.VuGdXfkrKUk