Xtract teamed up with Zenzic, a government-created organization with the mission to accelerate the United Kingdom’s connected vehicle ecosystem, to better understand how telematics data can be harnessed for safer and more efficient transportation.
Michael Flanagan, CEO of Xtract has been focused on vehicle telematics for the last decade after noticing the dramatic increase in motor claims and insurance premiums for commercial fleet customers, the transportation backbone of our modern economy.
While researching this problem and its impacts on consumers, commercial companies and the economy, Flanagan found that vehicle incident data acquisition and integration was the fundamental technical and user experience challenge that had to be solved. To reduce costs and provide better outcomes, the industry needs to develop solutions that immediately capture and report telematics data after any incident. This real-time telematics data capture needs to be augmented with fast and easy-to-use onsite driver incident reporting for a complete and accurate reconstructions of an incident.
Xtract decided to solve this problem by creating a platform that ingests telematics data from any source and recreates the incident like a movie scene in near real time after the incident occurs.
Xtract focused their testing at Smart Mobility Living Lab: London, taking advantage of the program’s access to the busy city environment in central London. With the testing centred in Woolwich, they spent five days collecting data from multiple telematics sources including smartphones, dashcams and OBD II, recording road events in real-time to strengthen the repository of information they draw from. They then combined the data gathered with CCTV, using the footage to support their visualisations with a video of events.
“We entered the programme to access the connected vehicle ecosystem in the UK” says Michael Flanagan, CEO of Xtract. “Being on the CAM Scale-Up programme has brought us into companies and people that we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to speak with in the past”.
Xtract aims to use the programme as a springboard to collect OEM quality data. OEMs have been challenged to work out what they want the data for and how to monetise it. While claims have not been a primary focus for OEMs, Xtract has been working with automotive data exchange companies to encourage OEMs to do the extra work needed to collect more robust data to facilitate accurate reconstruction of accidents. Through the Zenzic CAM Scale-Up programme, Xtract will be able to create a proof of concept that showcases their software to the CAM ecosystem and graphically demonstrates to OEMs the benefits of what can be done with the right data.
The company currently has integrations with the two largest telematics companies, and following the work completed as a result of participating in the Zenzic CAM Scale-Up programme they’re working with more fleets adopting Xtract as their incident management and reconstruction platform.
