Since expanding operations to Japan last year, we’ve been hard at work to prepare for commercial deployment, running a small handful of pilots—including one with Philips Japan to adapt our algorithms for the local market and optimize for Japan’s road conditions. As a result, we are excited to announce that our intelligent driver safety system is commercially available in Japan starting this week. Building on our efforts in the U.S. to improve driver safety, we’re working in partnership with ORIX, Japan’s largest automotive leasing company, and SoftBank, to deploy Nauto across commercial fleets.
In the U.S., we have already surpassed our initial goal for reducing collisions and helped to reduce claims by over 35% in fleets insured by Atlas Financial Holdings, Inc. It’s still early days, but we’re confident that we’ll be able to bring the same safety results to Japan, where road safety is also an urgent issue. As Tetsuro Ida, Nauto’s Head of Japan, recently shared at SoftBank World 2018, cell phone use continues to be one of the leading causes of collisions. With so many distractions behind the wheel, our safety enhancements — including real-time distraction detection — will help reduce the frequency of risky driving behaviors and enhance road safety for everyone in Japan.
“In 2017 alone, nearly 4,000 people were killed in car crashes in Japan,” said Ida. With the support of SoftBank and ORIX, we can quickly scale Nauto’s deployment in commercial fleets to create safer driving conditions in Japan and help prevent collisions before they happen.”
We found value in Nauto's unique capabilities that will improve the safety of our fleet customers," said Katsunobu Kamei, President of ORIX Auto Corporation. “With real-time feedback to coach distracted driving, Nauto will help our customers better identify and prevent distractions so that they can improve driver behavior and the safety of their fleets. Nauto’s safety insights are a strong value-add to our existing auto leasing and telematics customers, and also for attracting new customers.”
