Motive, the AI platform for physical operations, has unveiled AI-powered lane swerving detection, AI-powered smoking detection, and AI-powered forward parking detection as part of a set of new AI Driver Safety capabilities designed to detect early and reliable predictors of high-risk driving. 

The new capabilities are designed to give drivers and organizations real-time visibility into behaviors that can frequently precede severe roadway incidents, enabling faster intervention and preventing collisions before they happen.

Motive said there is a global road-safety crisis. Even with recent declines, traffic fatalities remain elevated, and fatigue, distraction, and roadway departures continue to fuel preventable deaths. This crisis puts increasing pressure on regulators, insurers, and operators to act. 

Motive is rapidly deploying new AI safety models designed to detect risks in real-time and intervene before dangerous behaviors escalate into collisions, protecting drivers and communities. Since 2023, the Motive AI Dashcam is estimated to have helped prevent over 170,000 accidents and saved 1,500 lives.

“The road-safety crisis has been escalating for years, and it demands new technology that evolves just as quickly,” said Hemant Banavar, chief product officer at Motive. “We’re rolling out advanced AI models, at a rapid pace to help surface early and reliable signs of danger before they become catastrophic. With new capabilities like repeated lane swerving detection, smoking detection, and forward parking detection, behaviors that were previously unnoticed can now be detected in real-time so drivers and managers can address risks and prevent collisions.”

New real-time AI-powered Driver Safety capabilities include:

AI-Powered Lane Swerving Detection

Lane swerving is a factor in 79% of fatigue-related collisions. Available with all AI Dashcams, this new capability is designed to identify repeated lane swerving and send real-time alerts to managers, with alerts to drivers coming in a future release. By flagging three or more swerves within five minutes at speeds above 50 miles per hour and compiling them into a single, clear safety event timeline, this new capability gives managers a holistic look at repeated risky behavior in a short window, which can make it easier to understand driving patterns, coach drivers quickly, and prevent fatigue and distraction-related collisions.

AI-Powered Smoking Detection

Studies show higher smoking rates correlate with increased vehicle deaths, with the act of lighting, holding, and disposing of a cigarette taking a driver’s hands off the wheel and eyes off the road for an average of 12 seconds. Smoking can be especially dangerous in hazmat operations, dramatically increasing the risk of collisions, fires, and other incidents. 

Available with the Motive Dual-Facing AI Dashcam, this new capability is designed to automatically detect when a cigarette is in a driver’s hand or mouth for more than five seconds while the vehicle is moving at five miles per hour or more, and sends immediate in-cab alerts to discourage smoking. Alerts are also sent to safety managers for timely follow-up and enforcement.

AI-Powered Forward Parking Detection

Forward parking is a frequent cause of low-speed collisions. Nearly 9% of pedestrian deaths in parking lots occur during vehicle backup incidents. 

Available on all AI Dashcams, this new capability is designed to detect when a vehicle reverses out of a spot after parking head-first, which can help organizations enforce safer parking practices and reduce collisions. Real-time alerts notify managers for follow-up coaching, while drivers can review events in the Motive Driver App to self-correct and reinforce safer habits.

"Safety is our top priority," said John Riddle, regional safety manager at The Dana Companies. "Motive’s industry-leading, accurate AI monitors and protects drivers and the new detection capabilities will help prevent more collisions. Before Motive, we never even saw some of these behaviors—unsafe lane changes, tight following distance. Now we can coach on it before it becomes a problem.”

Motive said its AI Dashcam leads the industry in AI performance. It detects more than 15 unsafe behaviors, including drowsiness, unsafe parking, and forward-collision risk. 

According to a 2023 study Motive commissioned from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, Motive’s AI Dashcam successfully alerted drivers to four unsafe driving behaviors two to four times more often than the AI dash cam models from two competitors. On average, customers that used Motive’s AI Dashcam reduced collisions by 80% and accident-related costs by 63%.

The Motive Driver Safety product uses AI Dashcam data from more than one million vehicles and assets to simulate, annotate, and train models on tens of millions of events annually.

Motive built the industry’s only human-in-the-loop validation system to review the output of its AI models in real time, with a team of approximately 400 full-time data annotators dedicated to reviewing safety videos and proactively eliminating false positives. The result is highly accurate event detection and monitoring, plus AI models that can understand nuanced context, detect risks in real-time, and alert drivers with life-saving speed.