App, Vehicle-to-Vehicle Network Seeks to Predict and Prevent Accidents

Eran Shir has an ambitious goal: Eliminate car crashes without waiting for the advent of autonomous vehicles. His company Nexar makes an app that turns smartphones into an "intelligent" dashcam that uses the phone's camera, accelerometer and gyroscope to collect information about what's happening on the road and to send it to the cloud for machine-learning analysis. Nexar now is crowdsourcing its data in San Francisco and New York to give drivers a real-time heads-up about dangers such as cars ahead suddenly stopping or swerving. "We are weaving everyone together to build a network of vehicles to track what's happening on the road, that can predict and prevent accidents," said Shir, co-founder and CEO of Tel Aviv's Nexar, which has offices in San Francisco and New York. For instance, "If you brake hard, all the cars behind you will be aware of that within 50 milliseconds."