UK "safety tech" companies saw a revenue increase of 21% over the past year to reach £381m, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors of the UK tech industry, according to a government-backed sectoral analysis. Conducted by Perspective Economics on behalf of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the UK safety tech sector: 2022 analysis found that the number of companies delivering safety tech products and services grew by 17% to 117, with jobs in the sector increasing by 30% to total 2,850. Of the 117 safety tech companies identified by the analysis, 57% are based outside London and the South East, with hotspots in Leeds and Edinburgh, and emerging centres of activity in Greater Manchester, Oxford, Bristol and Belfast. "There are encouraging signs of newly registered startups, particularly in the domains of tackling disinformation and developing new approaches to content moderation and video and image analysis at scale," said the analysis. "Existing firms specialising in communication and semantics are also moving into the safety tech domain. "As a result of considerable growth within UK safety tech, there has been sustained interest from the investment community.

There's little doubt that modern car safety features can be helpful, but Consumer Reports believes they could be crucial to saving lives. The publication just released a study estimating that US road deaths could be cut by 16,800 to 20,500, or roughly half of the 36,500 people lost in 2018, if certain safety features were standard on every car. Most of the lives saved, 11,800, would come fro ma combination of automatic emergency braking, blind spot warning, lane departure warning and pedestrian detection. Another 3,700 to 7,400 people could survive with drunk driving prevention tech, particularly the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety. Certain vehicle-to-vehicle connections could also save "at least" 1,300 lives by letting drivers known when it's safe to move through an intersection or make a left turn.