Tesla gets H.E.L.P.

Tesla is adding additional safety software to their vehicles soon. In a press release, Emergency Safety Solutions - a Texas based road-safety company - announced that they had partnered with Tesla to bring their Hazard Enhanced Location Protocol technology to Tesla's vehicles.

The ESS have been working to make roadways safer by improving the systems we have for protecting disabled vehicles on the roadside from getting hit by other drivers - a situation that ends up causing more than 15,000 deaths per year in the US.

HELP software does two things. First, it increases the flash rate for emergency signals - something that the data shows is much more eye-catching than the current blinker rate, which was established back in 1951 apparently.

But the biggest part of the HELP system is in how the software allows vehicles to communicate. Any vehicle with HELP will send digital notifications to oncoming drivers using their onboard mobile devices - provided those oncoming drivers also have HELP installed of course.

These systems can be activated manually or automatically if an airbag sensor is triggered or something like that. The reason this deal with Tesla is so exciting however, is that the system is designed to work with Autonomous Driving software as well. ESS noted that Tesla would be adding HELP to "a range" of their vehicles with a free over-the-air update to the software, but no date has yet been confirmed.

Roadside collisions account for a large amount of yearly accidental deaths - and a lot of those are sadly from folks stopping to help out. Good safety practices can only help so much, but with some technological help, we could hopefully see that the terrible 15000 per year death rate drops much lower.