It’s a pretty shocking thing, when you see the damage an accident can do to a vehicle…especially when it’s your vehicle.
Today’s invention is a new way to make drivers think about their own mortality and take greater care when on the road. It relies on the facts that:
a) when people can visualise something happening, they start to regard it as much more likely.
b) cars exist in a very limited number of designs and colours.
First, many of a nation’s car breakers would be equipped with a webcam. This they use to film the wrecks which are dragged in after road traffic accidents. This material is placed in a single image database.
As a vehicle speeds past a roadside camera, its numberplate is used to identify the colour and model of the car. Pictures of a crashed vehicle matching this description are then sent to a screen farther down the road. The driver will then see ‘his’ car apparently post-accident and, with any luck, it will have a sobering and slowing influence.
As an added flourish, an image of the numberplate in question could be automatically pasted into the crash scene, to force the message home in a personal way.
