Nissan uses sat nav in attempt to cut road deaths

Nissan is testing a communications system that it hopes will use mobile phone and GPS technology to reduce the number of pedestrians killed by cars.

Nissan’s advanced Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) will employ the latest generation of the 3G communications system, using GPS to track the location of pedestrians' phones.

These data and the location data from a vehicle’s GPS system are fed into ITS to determine the location of each in relation to the other. An alert can then be sent to the driver that a pedestrian is close by, enabling them to slow down in time.

In its 2007 report, released recently, the Commission for Integrated Transport found that the UK compares favourably with other European nations in terms of road safety, but not in the area of pedestrian safety.

“Despite our healthy overall record on road safety, pedestrians are more than twice as likely to be killed in the UK as in the Netherlands or Norway, a worrying trend which has persisted since our 2001 study,” explained commission member Andrew Sentence.

Nissan is studying what types of pedestrian data are most helpful in preventing accidents. It will also investigate factors such as the directions in which pedestrians and vehicles are moving and the speeds and distances between them.

The company is also looking into a variety of alert systems, ranging from visual to audible alarms.