Audi and Navistar to increase advanced safety features for school buses, emergency vehicles

Audi and commercial vehicle developer Navistar have announced they will be partnering to expand the development of their C-V2X technology that will be used in Audi vehicles, school buses, and various emergency response vehicles. The companies are developing the technology in response to the high number of accidents involving school buses and emergency response vehicles, which lead to hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries each year. 

The companies have worked closely with the Applied Information and Traffic Control Corporation to gather research on accidents in school zones and those involving emergency response vehicles, and the research suggests that many of them could have been avoided with more robust safety notification tools. 

The new technology would both notify Audi drivers of nearby school buses, emergency vehicles, and school zones while also notifying bus and emergency response drivers of oncoming cars moving at high speeds. It would theoretically tell Audi drivers to slow down in school zones and not commit stop-arm violations in these situations and would also help bus drivers to alert passengers to any danger. 

The platform would also notify Audi drivers that there is an emergency vehicle moving towards them from any direction, therefore allowing them to pull over immediately and not just wait until they could see the car. Audi and Navistar subsidiary International Truck will be working on the C-V2X platform that will be used for emergency response vehicles. 

The technology is expected to make its debut in the summer and is another way Audi and Navistar are trying to move towards autonomous driving technologies and advanced mobility tools. 

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