Though they share the road, bikes and vehicles don’t always play nice together. So Volvo, known for making some of the safest cars on the road, has helped develop a new safety helmet that lets bikes and vehicles communicate so that both cyclists and drivers are aware of each other when in close proximity — even if they can’t see each other.
Designed and developed in collaboration with POC as well as Ericsson, the concept helmet talks to the popular cyclist app Strava, which shares the rider’s location to the cloud so that it can be accessed by Volvo vehicles. When a bike is in the vicinity of the vehicle, even if out of sight, the driver gets a warning of where they are so they can slow down and be extra cautious. This works in the other direction too, with the Strava app getting the heads-up about a nearby car, warning the cyclist via a flashing alert light on the helmet.
The system obviously won’t do much to protect a cyclist if a collision still occurs (save for the helmet protecting their head) but it should go a long way towards actually preventing those collisions from occurring in the first place. And while there will certainly be concerns over privacy, and even the location data being used in court against a driver or cyclist, the system would still be completely anonymous with the best intentions of just keeping everyone sharing the roads a little safer.