Forward Collision Warning

Samsara AI dash cameras can detect when a vehicle comes within seconds of a forward collision, keeping drivers and others on the road safe from potential accidents. By enabling Forward Collision Warning in your AI Event Detection settings, you will have insight into dangerous driving behaviors and coach your fleet to be safer on the road. 

Additionally, if you choose to turn on In-Cab Audio Alerts, drivers will get a proactive voice message played to them to warn them about potential danger. 

You can enable this feature by following these steps: AI Event Detection Activation

Forward Collision Warning Detection

Samsara's AI dash cams will trigger a Forward Collision Warning if your dash cam sees that a vehicle is on a collision course with the vehicle directly ahead of it. Forward Collision Warning is activated during daytime hours only and triggers alerts above 25 mph to help reduce false positives at slow speeds. 

When your dash cam detects potential forward collisions, the bounding box around a vehicle will change first from green to orange, then red as the vehicles get closer to each other. 

Activating Forward Collision Warning

1. Navigate to Settings > Safety > Event Detection
2. Toggle the AI Event Detection setting On. You will know it is on when the toggle turns green.
   
   
3. Toggle the Forward Collision Warning setting On. You will know it is on when the toggle turns green.
4. When the Forward Collision Warning setting is turned on, you can change its sensitivity:
   • Near - Fewer events (recommended during testing to reduce the volume of false positives) 
   • Medium
   • Far - More events
5. Your cameras will automatically start calibrating using automatic vanishing point detection. No action is required on your end. Vehicles must drive for approximately 30 minutes at speeds >45mph to enable the calibration process to complete. Vehicles that are not calibrated will not trigger Forward Collision Warning events. If you are testing the feature and need to trigger events before calibration is complete, you can manually set the vanishing point using the “Edit” flow described in this article. It’s recommended that after testing, vehicles that had the manual override are “reset” so that they will recalibrate automatically every 2 weeks.
6. You can turn on In-Cab Audio Alerts for drivers so they hear a warning in real-time up to 2 seconds prior to the potential detected collision
7. Steps on how to configure setting on a per-vehicle basis can be found here. 

Reviewing Forward Collision Warning Events 

Once Forward Collision Warning is triggered, you’ll start to receive Safety Inbox events (a 10-second video with the label Forward Collision Warning).

If Samsara gets braking information from your vehicles, you may notice some Forward Collision Warning events be auto-dismissed. We automatically dismiss Forward Collision Warning events that don't have braking enabled. This is meant to reduce false positives from curved roads or vehicles passing in the opposite direction.

You can configure alerts to get notified via email or SMS when a Forward Collision Warning event occurs in the Alerts section of your dashboard. Learn more about configuring alerts here. 

Known Limitations of Forward Collision Warnings

• Forward Collision Warning (FCW) events won’t be included in driver Safety Scores during the testing phase
• FCW does not capture collision events from the side or rear of the vehicle
• FCW does not detect head-on collisions due to the relative speed being too high
• The in-cab audio alerts are delayed from the moment of the FCW trigger
• Accuracy is actively being improved. Common false triggers: 
  • Going through tunnels or underpasses
  • Curved roads
  • Reflections
  • Detection is less accurate in weather conditions that impact visibility, such as rain or snow