It’s a great day, you’re heading down the E11 in Dubai in your car that’s bursting at the seams with the latest in technology from car-to-car communication to taking you along a route that’s devoid of Star Wars advertising when unexpectedly after cornering a bit too fast, you hit a stop sign. While curses of varying lengths form in your mind and are lost in your beard, you quickly take a look around too see if anyone saw you committing a rather blatant act of stupidity. Seeing no one has, you quickly drive off, congratulating yourself at escaping an embarrassment and the fine that would surely accompany it. Unfortunately for you there was one witness: your car. And it’s going to call the cops on you.
While that last sentence may look more at home on r/creepy, it’s actually not a far flung phenomenon. Just this week a Florida car owner involved in a hit and run was ratted out by her car, which (I nearly wrote “who”) contacted the police as soon as the accident occurred. A dispatcher who, upon being notified, called Ms. Cathy Bernstein to enquire into what happened. The following is the transcript of the conversation:
She (the police dispatcher) is heard to say: “Ma’am, there’s no problem. Everything was fine.”
“OK. But your car called in saying you’d been involved in an accident. It doesn’t do that for no reason,” replies the dispatcher. Then she asks a knowing question: “Did you leave the scene of an accident?”
“No, I would never do that,” is Bernstein’s reply.
Unfortunately for Bernstein and fortunately for the victims of the hit-and-run, the police didn’t buy the lie and proceeded to Bernstein’s house where they found her Ford damaged, with paint from one of the vehicles she had hit stuck to it.
Suffice to say she was soon arrested and thankfully none of her victims were hurt during the hit-and-run, but it’s still amusing that the hero of the day is one we never thought we needed, it was Bat– 911 Assist, the piece of technology that works by pairing your car up with your bluetooth enabled smartphone, allowing you to talk with a police dispatcher in case you get in an accident and can’t reach the controls. It’s fascinating that a piece of tech designed to help people in accidents did its job by going above and beyond its requirements to help apprehend a culprit by being an accidental witness.
While this piece of technology is mostly seen in the United States, the European Union has decreed it to be compulsory in European cars by 2018, and I sincerely hope it will trickle across the world to places like Dubai in an effort to raise road safety. Unfortunately one of the hindrances is the lack of infrastructure, some cities may not have a police system that can integrate into the system and there’s no doubt that not all cars being driven on roads are modern and new, and as result lack features like Bluetooth, etc.
While the sceptics are still unsure if connected cars can actually make roads safer, we’ll know that if technology like this becomes widespread, hit-and-run drivers will have less of an incentive to run.
