“As the name of our company suggests, we consider ourselves as a friend of the drivers and we are powered by Artificial Intelligence. With the product completely developed in India, it has been four years since our inception,” says Sandeep Saxena, VP – Revenue, drivebuddy AI.

 Saxena spoke recently at the first edition of “ChemConnect 2022”, a logistics and supply chain event, organized by Indian Chemical News (ICN) on September 21, 2022 at The Lalit, Mumbai. 

“Our product has two or three components. The mound has two cameras, one faces the road and other faces the driver. The front road facing camera can analyse speed breaker distance from the truck in front and a whole lot of other parameters like potholes. If the vehicle is at a certain speed and time to collision is very short, it alerts the driver saying you are too fast or your or if the vehicle breaks down then there is a chance of a collision and this happens in real time. The human voice alerts can be in any language that the driver understands. On the other side, the driver camera looks at the driver and can analyse their distracted driver, drunk driver, drowsy driver and so on. Again it alerts the driver saying you were too tired and you should take a break. If the driver does not respond, then the alert goes to the head office. Normally if a person starts falling asleep, it takes about 30 minutes for him to completely fall asleep while driving,” says Saxena. 

“There is a lot of data that we have about 20 lakh kilometres of data we already have from Indian roads and we have done a lot of analysis of how many times the person yawns, how many times does a person blink his eyes, how many times a person is looking at both the rear view mirrors. Plus, we have a cloud platform. If the driver is not attentive or even if he is attentive, the video goes on the cloud and the fleet managers can download these videos. They can also see these videos at a later date, 10 days later, 15 days later, or a one month later,” adds Saxena.

“On our dashboard we have about 40 or 50 vehicles and one can have the vehicle numbers and click on the videos. A lot of drivers and fleet owners have told us that with such a thing, a driver will never come on board.He will never want to drive a vehicle as it’s like a big boss watching them. However, our experience has been a little different as the owner tells the driver that this is to save your life and the driver then flaunts the same and now the other drivers are asking us when are you installing this in our vehicle? So its been a very good experience.” 

“Our product comes with a hardware and there is a tracking page or there is a video page on the portal. We have been able to reduce accidents to the extent of 68%. Anybody who wants to see this data is most welcome. We would want to share a lot of data,” said Saxena.

Listing out the milestones for his company, Saxena added: “The company was incorporated in 2018. So its been about four years of product development. We did a commercial launch of the product in June 2021. We filed for three intellectual property patents. We have a patent for the device and some are for a few algorithm. One is already granted and two are in the pipeline. We are currently getting about one lakh kilometres of data per day. Interestingly one of our client’s vehicles drives a thousand kilometers in a single day. They have two drivers and thus a lot of rotation. Since it is a tractor trailer combination, loading, unloading independent of the driver saves a lot of time.”

“There are some transporters whom we work with have this whole layer of clients where let’s say a chemical company is a client and then there is a broker or a booking agent and then finally there is a truck owner who are mostly single owners. What we have found is that the client is now mandating it to the transporter team. At least to begin with and experience this product you will have to work with one or two transporters. There are a few companies owning a truck and there are multiple brokers and what they did was they asked one of the transporters who get the product installed and tested. Now they are going forward with it. There is a need to educate the entire chain and slowly the messages are going to populate. It is challenging,” added Saxena.

“Union Minister, Mr. Nitin Gadkari has already started an action plan on making driver drowsiness detection mandatory on all commercial vehicles. It may take three to six months, or it may take one year, but the road has already started. There are challenges in terms of who should pay? Should the client pay or the transporter pay? Should the government pay? I am not saying its easy but if we work together, we will be able to find a solution. We have already done multiple such installations,” Saxena said.