Tesla has entered into a major agreement with Emergency Safety Solutions, Inc., to implement the company’s Hazard Enhanced Location Protocol (HELP) technology. The HELP program revolutionizes vehicle hazard warning systems, helping to prevent crashes involving disabled or vulnerable vehicles and their occupants. With the agreement, Tesla is the first passenger vehicle company to implement the technology.
ESS developed HELP to prevent car accidents where vehicles collide with disabled cars. The HELP technology meets regulatory standards, the company says, and helps combine on-board intelligence to write two types of near-fail-safe warnings to make a disabled vehicle more visible. The HELP system uses lighting alerts as well as digital alerts to warn approaching drivers.
Lighting alerts are “in the form of highly visible emergency-based lighting output,” while digital notifications are sent to approaching vehicles via GPS-based mapping applications.
“This is great news to significantly increase road safety,” said ESS CEO Tom Metzger. “Tesla is a leader in bringing innovation to passenger vehicles for the first time and is leading the way by implementing HELP technology in potentially millions of Tesla vehicles worldwide. It is a monumental step in the effort to overcome the worrying safety issue of crashes involving disabled and vulnerable vehicles, which tragically injure or kill tens of thousands of people around the world each year.”
Tesla has a reputation for prioritizing the safety of its vehicles through various standards. The company has top crash safety ratings with the NHTSA with all four of its vehicles. In addition, with the help of advanced driver assistance systems like Autopilot, Tesla vehicles are involved in an accident ten times less often than the national average, company data suggests.
Tesla will implement HELP technology “in a range of vehicles” across its lineup, ESS said.
ESS states that 291,516 people have been affected by disabled vehicle accidents since 2018, and 60,400 of those affected have lost their lives. ESS data shows that 200 people are involved every day.
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