Artificial intelligence is now taking up more and more space in our cars and the entire eco-system that surrounds it. Waze has made this a strength by introducing a new feature that combines historical and real-time accident data from the Waze community to alert motorists of potentially accident-prone roads.
If you use your car regularly, you probably also use the Waze navigation app, even if you know your way to work perfectly every day.
Waze is a community application that allows you to have, in real time, the state of road traffic, to know if there is an accident or to know the location of the police or a control zone. Most of the time, users use Waze via their smartphone and Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.
But recently, we have seen Waze arrive directly natively on several electric cars, notably those equipped with Google Automotive such as the Renault Mégane E-Tech or the most recent Volvos.
” Prevention is better than cure “
Waze continues to make improvements to its application, although lately the tide seems to be turning slightly for the company. The application is singled out for approximations in terms of travel timessometimes with readjustments in the middle of the journey even though there has not necessarily been a significant change in the traffic situation since the start.
Today, Waze is introducing an exciting new feature, with accident alert history to help users make the best decisions on the road.
Behind this rather opaque formulation, the functionality is rather well done since, thanks to artificial intelligence and by combining historical and real-time accident data from the Waze community, motorists will be able to be alerted in real time of roads likely to be injured during their journey. In other words, this helps prevent potentially accident-prone areas.
If your route includes a road at risk of accident Waze will display an alert indicating “accident history” before you reach this road segment.
What will be the role of AI?
But what does AI have to do with this if the history of accidents is already known? Its role will be to analyze the characteristics of the road, such as the usual traffic level, whether it is a motorway or a local road, altitude and other factors, in order to ‘alert drivers on roads where they should exercise extra caution.
So fun fact, Waze will send some sort of alert to the driver to tell them to be careful in that area. The alert will, however, occur a little before the area concerned, and Waze specifies “limit the number of crash history alerts that drivers can see and do not display them on routes they regularly take”.