Volvo Unveils New Accident Ahead Alert Safety Feature

A new feature from Volvo notifies drivers of accidents that have been reported on the road ahead. While many phone apps offer comparable services for free and can be integrated with your car's infotainment system, Volvo's offering doesn't seem all that innovative at first glance.
However, it does so by using the vehicle's proprietary user interface to access real-time data from traffic management centers run by the government, technically making this feature unique to the automotive sector.


Volvo's Accident Ahead Alert service is currently limited to Denmark since it necessitates communication between the car and a national traffic management hub. But the idea is to work with the European Data for Road Safety ecosystem to partner on expanding the feature to include more data and cover all of Europe. This is done in addition to enabling information sharing between linked Volvo devices.
“We’re happy that Volvo Cars as the first car maker has started using our new real-time traffic event data feed,” Stine Bendsen, head of the Danish Traffic Management Centre at the Danish Road Directorate, said as part of the release.


“A quick alert about an accident ahead gives the driver more time to slow down and increase the distance to the car in front. This helps to lower the risk of follow-up collisions and protect the people working to clear the road.”
In 2016, Volvo introduced its groundbreaking connected safety technology, utilizing the cloud to connect its vehicles and notify drivers of potential hazards and slick roads in the vicinity. The company is now requesting anonymous traffic accident data from all road authorities and is pushing other automakers to follow suit by providing comparable technologies.

In order to take advantage of this technology and improve overall road safety, owners of Volvo cars in counties where it is available only need to turn it on via the center display of their vehicle. Volvo claims that the technology only exchanges necessary data, which is anonymized to safeguard users' privacy.