Zendrive went into business to do one thing: save lives on today’s busy roads using data and analytics. We know that a single dangerous driver affects everybody, both inside and outside of that driver’s car. We also know that lives change dramatically when there’s a technological advancement—especially in the automotive world.
The two major safety measures that we think about today happened a while back…as in back in 1968.
- One, federal law required all motor vehicles be equipped with seat belts.
And two, that same year car manufacturers began testing onboard diagnostics (OBD). - Since then, safety measures and practices improved when it came to making safer cars, but it’s alarming that they still seemed to focus less on empowering safer drivers.
The driving experience has evolved dramatically in the five decades since then, and we now need to tackle this new challenge, fueled in large part by the sheer fact that there are so many cars filling the streets each day. With more cars, comes more drivers and more passengers. According to Pew Research Center and TechCrunch, 77% of Americans own smartphones and average usage has reached five hours per day. Chances are, some of that time is spent while sitting in—or worse, driving—the car.
More cars, more people and more mobile devices mean more collisions or even fatalities due to distracted driving. Zendrive developed a mobile platform to address the new normal in dangerous driving. Our Data Acquisition Systems (DAS) use smartphone-based telematics that are far more accurate than traditional hardware-based devices, as much as 6-times more accurate at predicting risky driving than the industry’s standard methodologies can. Let’s look at the side-by-side comparison between OBD and DAS.
So what does this all mean? A better understanding of what activity contributes to dangerous car events enables better opportunities to prevent them from happening. We’re empowering safer driving by measuring behavior inside the car, not just the car’s behavior.
Over the last six months, we’ve amassed over 3040billion miles of driving data, and we’re adding billions more each month. This is helping Zendrive turn the average smartphone into a super-accurate safety solution, and providing the average smartphone user with the tools to prioritize safety while in a motorized vehicle. We’re solving the problems that OBD alone simply isn’t able to. In short, we’ve come a long way since the seat belt.
