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TomTom Launches Hazard Warnings with Push Notification Support

What sets Waze apart from the rest of the industry is its reporting system that allows drivers to alert others of hazards spotted on the road, and these include everything from potholes and accidents to traffic jams and roadkill.
TomTom says it has a fleet of 600 million devices working together for Hazard Warnings 1 photo
Photo: TomTom
This concept of working together to make the road more predictable, and eventually safer for everybody, has caught the attention of several companies that started looking into similar technologies that could eventually be based on a similar approach.

TomTom is one of them, and the newly-released Hazard Warnings works with information collected from multiple sources, including GPS probe data from 600 million connected devices. In other words, the entire TomTom device fleet is working together, all with the purpose of delivering hazard alerts to your car.

The company says it focused specifically on making the system as fast as possible, and the low-latency push service it implemented allows for a notification to be sent to a vehicle in no less than five seconds.

The system can warn of a wide array of hazards, including poor road conditions, objects on the road or roadworks, accidents, jam tails, vehicle breakdowns, slippery roads, fog, and strong winds.

The alert lands right on your head unit along with visual and audio warnings, thus helping you make an informed decision according to your route. In the case of automated and semi-automated vehicles part of the TomTom network, the system allows for an automatic response, which can include anything from a simple maneuver, such as slowing down, to choosing a different route to avoid a hazard.

TomTom’s Hazards Service harnesses industry-first push technologies to deliver hazard notifications to vehicles with low latency. It draws on the OpenLR location referencing method to pinpoint a hazard’s exact position on the road and transmit that location to the vehicle. Hazard warnings appear in driver navigation systems with display and audio alerts. In automated driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), hazard data can also be used to automatically adjust a vehicle’s driving behavior,” TomTom explains.

According to the company, the Hazard Warnings are available in 75 countries and the real-time traffic data is collected for 3.7 billion kilometers of road networks.
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About the author: Bogdan Popa
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Bogdan keeps an eye on how technology is taking over the car world. His long-term goals are buying an 18-wheeler because he needs more space for his kid’s toys, and convincing Google and Apple that Android Auto and CarPlay deserve at least as much attention as their phones.
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