Road safety emerged as key theme for network equipment makers at Mobile World Congress this week.
Speaking to the press and analyst community on Sunday evening, Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri highlighted a number of areas in which the Internet of Things (IoT) will help improve people’s lives, including facilitating a better and safer experience on the roads.
Driver error causes 90% of road traffic accidents, Suri said. "What if we could make those things go away? [We could] make car crashes a thing of the past."
Automated driving can reduce fatalities by 50%, he said. That could mean saving half a million lives per year.
Meanwhile, Ericsson on Monday launched its Connected Traffic Cloud, a platform that enables road traffic authorities to share data from connected cars.
The end result should be fewer road deaths, lower CO2 emissions and reduced traffic jams, Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg explained. It will help authorities to lower costs "and save people’s lives," he said.
According to Vestberg, road deaths reached 1.24 million globally in 2013, while traffic jams cost over US$100 billion per year in the U.S. alone.
