Smart mobility specialist Wejo has launched Road Health and Winter Road Insights to improve road safety management and enable authorities to take pre-emptive decisions.

The two new solutions are powered by NIRA Dynamics, a vehicle onboard analytics and road perception company specialising in sensor fusion and road surface monitoring systems. It is a subsidiary of CARIAD, an automotive software company within the Volkswagen Group.

Road Health and Winter Road Insights aggregate data insights across roads so that governments can shift from reactive to proactive road safety and make informed lifesaving decisions.

Road Health collects road information, combining road friction, roughness, potholes and road bumps in real-time to create a detailed view of road surface conditions across towns and cities. Preserving and maintaining community transportation infrastructure is a necessary and expensive endeavour. With the insights from Road Health, transportation departments can analyse the conditions of vehicles, causes of maintenance needs, and reasons for structural deterioration on roads to get a clear view of what has happened before and now, improving road safety and decreasing maintenance and asset management costs.

Winter Road Insights enables governments to effectively treat road networks and make life-saving decisions during the winter. By monitoring the performance of the road networks during potentially dangerous weather conditions, Winter Road Insights compiles road temperature data, slippery alerts to better inform salting, road closures and snow removal plans.

“These solutions expand government agencies’ capabilities to analyse comprehensive road-by-road intelligence on how weather conditions are impacting road safety and identify road maintenance priorities using connected vehicle data,” said Richard Barlow, Founder and CEO of Wejo. “By pairing historical knowledge of long-term road health with current road condition insights, towns, cities and state transportation departments can deliver faster, smarter, and safer journeys for everyone on the road.”

“With the joint efforts of our companies, we will provide information to improve road safety across the US and in Europe,” said Lisa Åbom, CEO of NIRA Dynamics. “Connected car data makes it possible to improve safety by optimising road maintenance and providing visibility of what is happening on our roads throughout the year.”