Story by Sarah Lowe
Photography by Brooke Baker

IF you are at all worried about being conspicuous as you drive through town, you shouldn’t take a ride in the eDrive filming vehicle. Most cars slow, people point, and wherever the car is parked it invites a barrage of questions.

This is because it isn’t exactly your average car. It’s the result of a lot of research, took months to fit out, and contains an impressive $60,000 worth of gear. On board are nine high-definition cameras, a stack of ultra-fast computers, and a complex network to coordinate cameras and computers with their own inbuilt power supply. There is a GPS system to help verify where the footage was taken and sensors provide information on steering wheel movements, speed and G-forces.

If you’re wondering whether all this is for a good cause, the answer is absolutely. Road safety expert Dr Robert Isler has developed a programme he says will save lives on our roads. That’s a huge call, but Isler, a senior lecturer in psychology at Waikato University, and his team have the research to back it up. His research indicates the important part of learning to drive isn’t actually the manual part – steering and changing gears – in fact, this is usually learned too quickly, and drivers become too confident for their own good. The skills that are directly related to crash risk have much more to do with spotting, anticipating and managing hazards.

Research has shown the part of the brain responsible for these actions can be trained, and safely at that. Enter eDrive. The footage captured by the filming vehicle shows from the driver’s perspective exactly what a real-life road might serve up. Children crossing, weather conditions, you name it, and the nine cameras will probably have caught it. These videos are then collated and integrated into a single realistic-looking dashboard, so that drivers can practise their “hazard-vision” on the internet without having to get out onto the road, or concentrate on their steering to do it. “This isn’t something we dreamed up overnight,” Isler says. “It is all evidence-based, shown to work, and that’s why I’m so confident in this application.”

Racing legend Greg Murphy is a supporter of the project, and is also the online programme’s host. “This is a project very close to my heart,” Murphy says in the introductory video, “because I know first-hand how important it is to have these skills.” Another video shows him speaking about his own driving experience, and how, without the skills eDrive fosters, he would certainly not be around today to talk about it. A little morbid, perhaps, but you only have to look at the headlines speaking of yet another New Zealand road crash to truly see the meaning of morbid.

Government agencies New Zealand Transport Authority and the Accident Compensation Corporation have helped fund the project, and have sponsored access through their own websites. BP and Suzuki are also sponsors and eDrive hopes to get further input from New Zealand companies, for example to be able to include tangible “rewards” that users can find along the journey, to keep them motivated.

eDrive’s team includes server experts in Wellington, web designers and illustrators in Auckland, a Hamilton-based board of directors, not to mention the camera and vehicle specialists who put the car together with great patience. The footage was painstakingly captured over a number of months. Local police lent a hand in some locations, setting up scenarios and helping to film them. The filming done in and around Christchurch was done before February’s earthquake, so this footage shows the town centre and buildings intact as they were before the disaster.

One of the challenges of production was having no existing software model to build on. “We didn’t have something to copy and improve on,” Isler says. “Much of it was stuff we were inventing as we went.” In post-production, countless hours of footage needed to be viewed, searched and narrowed down so that the curriculum was complete. After that, all the clips collected needed to be composited into the fully functional digital dashboard, including the view from all the mirrors, appropriate windscreen wipers, indicators and speedometer.

Though it has clearly taken a while and a lot of work to get to this point, it seems the eDrive team are setting their sights on bigger and better already. A future improved version of the website is already being investigated, perhaps with 360-degree cameras that allow users to look right around their virtual car. Overseas versions are also next on their list, with interest in the technology already coming in from Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom.

When asked about the motivation behind eDrive, it is with a parent’s hat on that Isler replies. He describes the unsettled feeling he has had during late-night waits for his teenage daughters to pull into the driveway. “If we can find a way to send more teenagers home safe to their families at the end of their time on the road each day, then we’ve done our job. If all this technology can achieve that, it has all been worth it.”