An app that warns of dangers ahead on road

Bloomberg

Drivers in San Francisco, Manhattan and Tel Aviv may soon have another safety tool at their disposal: a mobile app that alerts them to dangers ahead in the road. Nexar Ltd., an Israeli startup whose app records video from a smartphone’s camera to capture hard brakes and collisions, will turn its users into a vehicle-to-vehicle network to prevent crashes before they happen. The app is already used by professional car fleets and insurance companies to reconstruct traffic accidents.
Using the suite of phone sensors such as the accelerometer and gyroscope, Nexar installed in one car will be able to send an alert to a driver in another vehicle if it makes a sudden stop, for example, or if an obstacle is blocking traffic. These sensors are delicate enough to let the app log potholes and other damage to roads as a car is driven over them. Data is uploaded to remote servers via either Wi-Fi or cellular connection depending on the urgency of the data recorded then made accessible to other installations of the app.
Since launching in February with its recording application, Nexar has signed on 50,000 users in Tel Aviv, San Francisco and Manhattan, clocked about 2 million driving hours, and recorded about half a million instances of dangerous driving events, according to Chief Executive Officer Eran Shir.
The number of fatalities from car crashes increased more than 7 percent in the US last year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Wide-scale deployment of vehicle-to-vehicle networks could prevent about 79 percent of all collisions, the administration said in a 2014 report. The US government issued its automated vehicles safety policy in September, following the fatal Florida crash of a Tesla Model
S whose driver was using its
Autopilot technology. According to ResearchandMarkets, the connected car market is growing at about 11 percent annually, and is expected to reach $80 billion by 2025.