AXA Smart Bell Plays Alert Sounds on the Radios of Nearby Cars

We all know there is no love lost between urban bike riders (or cyclists in general) and car drivers, with both sides coming up with a valid set of arguments. The former quote the general aggressive attitude and sense of entitlement of the former, while they, in turn, point out to the reckless way that some bicyclists tend to ride their vehicles, with no regard to traffic laws or indeed common sense.

But while this kind of people represents a minority, stereotyping tends to spread like wildfire, meaning a cyclist is likely to be very aggressive toward a driver that did him even the slightest wrong, while drivers don't usually need any provocation to feel resent toward their self-propelled two-wheeled traffic buddies. Even though they haven't really shared the turf for more than one hundred years, it's an antagonized relationship that feels ancestral.

AXA, an international insurance company from France, has come up with a solution to mediate communication between the two camps. Before you get too excited, though, the AXA Smart Bell isn't actually real and it can't be purchased, so it looks like the feud is going to continue.

Not that AXA's idea is that brilliant. Sure, sending an audible message to a car would make cycling much safer, but it might also become really annoying. Imagine you're in the middle of a conversation and you're about to hear something important when the voice of your conversation partner is cut out, and the sound of a bike bell comes up. That's borderline on violating somebody's privacy.

And it doesn't even give you any information about where the bike is coming from, what it is exactly you can do to make their lives better or even whether the message was intended for you or some other driver.

The clip shows a device that uses RDS technology to get the message across to the cars' audio units. If the Smart Bell were to become a reality, it would be only a matter of time before the messages sent to the driver would become abusive rants, turning it into another weapon in this ongoing war.

Luckily, the Smart Bell is nothing but a marketing campaign meant to hook cyclists to sign up for bike insurance. But don't lose any sleep over it: I'm telling you, it might have sounded like a good idea, but we really dodged a bullet here.