We want to take you along on a little ride. It's a short story about how we recently were caught up in a traffic accident ourselves. Building tools to minimize traffic accidents and their impact is our daily business, and being reminded firsthand of the dangerous nature of the road only reinforces our resolve.

A day in spring like any other 

As one of AutoBinck Group's proud ventures, we met up at their headquarters in WTC Utrecht to talk about some exciting new stuff. One energizing and inspiring meeting later, it was time to head back home, so we merged onto the highway. A few kilometers into the trip, the statistics we deal with on a daily basis suddenly became a harsh reality.

No time to brace for impact

A fairly large piece of diamond plate had fallen off a truck. It was flung across the road quite violently and literally caught us by surprise. It smashed straight into our car, hitting us head on. We were traveling at a respectable speed of 100 km/h, so most front panels of our car exploded in a shower of plastic, our number plate tumbled right over our heads and the diamond plate bounced off of our car and continued its path of destruction into oncoming traffic.

A common sigh of relief

Not fully processing what had just happened, we were able to make it to the hard shoulder safely, where we were met by some other unfortunate souls that had crashed into the diamond plate. We let out a common sigh of relief that the front of our car took the brunt of the impact, and prevented this huge slab of metal from going straight through our windshield. We informed the authorities of the situation, assessed the damage, checked if everybody else involved was okay, and thanks to the amazing build quality of the Škoda Kodiaq we were traveling in, we were able to continue our journey home.

Every downside has its upsides

You could say that we fell upon some bad luck, but no one was injured, so all is well. But to be fair, to us things couldn't really have been better. An unplanned and involuntary field test presented itself, because the car we were traveling in, was loaded up to the brim with our crash detection and driving behavior monitoring hardware.

We saw that the accident was logged right away, displaying the severity, the point of impact, and our contact information, to ensure that the receiving party could contact us and check our status immediately. Of course, this was no surprise to us. But what made it so special was that this was the first time we got to experience it ourselves, on the receiving end. Thanks to all the live crash tests at Spearhead AG, we were very confident in our product in a technical sense, but actually experiencing it yourself ensures that you also know how it truly feels; the reassurance that someone is immediately there for you when things go wrong.

Let us be very frank here. The reassurance that people know what happened to you and can act accordingly in an instant is a very, very comforting thought.

What made things even more noteworthy, for a lack of a better term, is that our marketing consultant at Pappenheimers was right there in the car with us, so after shaking off the initial shock, we defaulted straight into work mode. That's why we're able to now share our relatively low impact crash experience with you, represented in data captured from our SafeDrivePod, and put into context from a driver's perspective. Now there's some true commitment to the cause.

We're now more than capable than ever before to tell you everything about our crash detection method. From a company perspective and even from a driver's perspective, we're more than willing to share our knowledge on how to greatly benefit from SafeDriveResponse.