What do you mean, an invention of the past? You might ask, just a few months ago the DGT (Directorate General of Traffic) announced that hazard warning lights will be mandatory for all cars in the coming years. Have the editors of this blog gone crazy?
Not at all. We've previously discussed how connected hazard warning lights will soon become a key element in saving lives on the road. But the automotive sector is evolving at a frenetic pace, and our next steps will be decisive in further improving roadside signaling.
So, what happens next? We invite you to follow this post for a technological reflection on road safety that's truly yet to come.
Where we come from
Let's start with the invention of light. No, this isn't the forum to debate whether electricity was Tesla's invention or whether Edison really got the credit for creating the light bulb. We accept that an event of such magnitude required the ingenuity and determination of several geniuses throughout history. After all, who hasn't stopped to think about what our lives would be like if artificial light hadn't been discovered?
If we follow all the applications in which the use of light has become essential, we'll see how everything around us is slowly crumbling like dominoes. Because, let's face it, today we wouldn't know how to live without it. And that, ultimately, is the best thing about technological advances: they arrive in a display of creativity to make our lives easier, but little by little they spread their networks and become embedded in different everyday areas until, before we know it, they're already part of our lives.
But how did we find our way around before without Google Maps? Could we really reach unknown destinations by car? Just with a paper map? Yes, it meant hours of poring over maps, driving around on wrong turns, rolling down the window to ask that stranger who looked like he was from the neighborhood, and—why not admit it?—the occasional argument with our partner about whether we should have turned left on the previous street. But—with patience—we all eventually reached our destination.
And are we happier now that we've avoided all that process? At least when it comes to travel and mobility, the answer is resoundingly yes. Similarly, and despite being a much more recent invention, V16 emergency lights are also undergoing their own evolutionary process to make our lives easier and, in this case, also safer.
Today's safety is called 'V16 emergency light'
We're not going to start from the very beginning because, recently, we unraveled the details of the birth of V16 warning signs on this blog. In that post, titled " Help Flash, the story of a brilliant event ," we discussed the origins of this invention that revolutionized road safety warnings.
Although it is important, in order not to lose the thread of this reflection, to remember that the first prototype of the Help Flash emergency light had already been designed in 1998, when we were still buying removable radios to put compact discs in the car, the Alcatel One Touch Easy was every teenager's dream and Luis Moya starred alongside Carlos Sainz in that famous "try to start it" in the hotly contested Rally of Great Britain.
And with hardly any electronic applications in cars, until relatively recently all decisions involved in driving had to be made by a skilled driver responding swiftly to the different visual and audible stimuli encountered along the way: the colors of traffic lights, traffic signs, the sirens of special vehicles... And it was precisely under this premise that Help Flash was born, a luminous beacon that visually improves the signaling systems that previously existed on the market.
Years passed, and connectivity invaded our lives as electronics took over the controls of our cars. To the point that, currently, the driving process is shared with vehicles through various driver assistance systems (ADAS). Among the best known are adaptive cruise control, emergency braking, and lane departure warning. For these to work, vehicles have been equipped with hardware and software capable of "reading" and interpreting road signs and elements. From what we see, the trend is for ADAS to gain ground over manual driving, rising to the level of achieving the coveted 100% autonomous driving.
That's why we at Help Flash were clear: emergency lights need to connect to our environment. No sooner said than done, in 2020 we entered the digital world with the launch of the first mobile-connected V16 beacon and a roadside assistance app , and last year we took a definitive step toward road connectivity with Help Flash IoT .
In addition to its usefulness as a traditional V-16 emergency light, physically signaling incidents on the road, this IoT device is also a virtual signaling tool, as it incorporates a communications module and a SIM card that will allow geolocation to be sent to the DGT 3.0.
From its cloud, the DGT will notify all drivers via road signs and our browsers of the actual situation and exact location of various incidents on the road, providing advance warning of the incident to anticipate danger and, therefore, doubly reducing the risk of collisions.
The future lies in connectivity
We're already in this mixed driving model today, but what will happen in a few years? Wouldn't it help to provide vehicles with real, immediate information in an easily readable format?
To answer these questions, various platforms, initiatives and products have been developed, including DGT 3.0, Data for Road Safety and Incidence .
The goal is to improve road safety and create an environment suited to the reality of autonomous vehicles. To this end, platforms like Incidence provide a solution by interconnecting various systems similar to V16 signals. This is the geolocation of different elements and events on the road, which is then shared with vehicles, drivers, and infrastructure.
In this way, the car will know in advance where there is a broken-down vehicle, a maintenance worker, a slow-moving vehicle, or a cyclist. In other words, we will move from physical signage to 100% virtual ones, where cars will no longer need to see or hear, as all the information they need will be available in the cloud, allowing them complete autonomy. But that's still a long way off.
In the meantime, we humans will have to remain responsible for our own road safety and that of everyone else, correctly signaling road incidents with our geolocated V-16 IoT emergency lights, which the Official State Gazette (BOE) has designated as mandatory starting in 2026.
