AI-powered fleet technology specialist Motive has launched a raft of new AI driver safety capabilities in a major advancement in proactive road safety technology.

The AI-powered Lane Swerving Detection, Smoking Detection and Forward Parking Detection solutions identify early signs of distracted and fatigued driving to help prevent collisions.

Part of the AI Driver Safety portfolio, the new services are designed to give drivers and organisations real-time visibility into behaviours that can frequently precede severe roadway incidents, enabling faster intervention and preventing collisions before they happen.

Fatigue, distraction and roadway departures continue to be major causes of preventable deaths, and Motive, which recently launched in the UK, is rapidly deploying new AI safety models designed to detect risks in real-time and intervene before dangerous behaviours escalate into collisions, protecting drivers and communities.

Since 2023, the Motive AI Dashcam is estimated to have helped prevent over 170,000 accidents and saved 1,500 lives.

Hemant Banavar, chief product officer at Motive, said: “The road-safety crisis has been escalating for years, and it demands new technology that evolves just as quickly.

“We’re rolling out advanced AI models, at a rapid pace to help surface early and reliable signs of danger before they become catastrophic. With new capabilities such as repeated lane swerving detection, smoking detection, and forward parking detection, behaviours that were previously unnoticed can now be detected in real-time so drivers and managers can address risks and prevent collisions.”

The new real-time AI-powered Driver Safety capabilities include Lane Swerving Detection. Lane swerving is a factor in 79% of fatigue-related collisions. Available with all AI Dashcams, this new capability is designed to identify repeated lane swerving and send real-time alerts to managers, with alerts to drivers coming in a future release.

Meanwhile, the new AI-powered Smoking Detection helps fleets clamp down on the risks from smoking. Studies show higher smoking rates correlate with increased vehicle deaths, with the act of lighting, holding, and disposing of a cigarette taking a driver’s hands off the wheel and eyes off the road for an average of 12 seconds. The AI-powered Smoking Detection is available with the Motive Dual-Facing AI Dashcam and designed to automatically detect when a cigarette is in a driver’s hand or mouth for more than five seconds while the vehicle is moving at 5mph or more, and sends immediate in-cab alerts to discourage smoking. Alerts are also sent to safety managers for timely follow-up and enforcement.

Finally, the new AI-powered Forward Parking Detection is available on all AI Dashcams and designed to detect when a vehicle reverses out of a spot after parking head-first, which can help organisations enforce safer parking practices and reduce collisions. Real-time alerts notify managers for follow-up coaching, while drivers can review events in the Motive Driver App to self-correct and reinforce safer habits.

The Motive Driver Safety product uses AI Dashcam data from more than one million vehicles and assets to simulate, annotate and train models on tens of millions of events annually. Motive says its unique human-in-the-loop validation system reviews the output of its AI models in real time, with a team of some 400 full-time data annotators dedicated to reviewing safety videos and proactively eliminating false positives.

“The result is highly accurate event detection and monitoring, plus AI models that can understand nuanced context, detect risks in real-time, and alert drivers with life-saving speed,” a spokesperson explained.