Cars are getting smarter, to the point where an accident can trigger an automatic alert that could save lives.

This service is currently available through Toyota Safety Connect, a system designed to connect drivers with the Toyota Response Center around the clock in the event of an emergency.

“Did the vehicle roll over, where did the impact come from in the vehicle?” said Kevin O’Dell (pictured, right), director of engineering at Toyota Connected North America. “If we know that and our systems know that, we can tell law enforcement or first responders. There’s what they call a ‘golden hour.’ A golden hour is where they can really save lives and if it goes past an hour, that’s when things start going downhill.”

O’Dell spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante at the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Isaac Broyles (left), managing engineer at Toyota Connected North America, as they discussed how Toyota’s safety service is driven by the work of IT behind the scenes.

Linking an agent in seconds

The key concept behind Toyota Service Connect is to provide technology that senses when a vehicular event has happened and take action to notify service center personnel.

“The vehicle is smart enough to say there’s an impact or the airbag deployed, and there’s a communication module in that vehicle that will call out to our platform,” O’Dell explained. “That then links to a safety agent within three to five seconds. With the click of a button, they can have safety services respond to you and help you out.”

Toyota’s service is dependent on an IT platform that can handle volume and scale when needed with little delay and no downtime. Toyota Connected North America relies on Mongo DB Inc. for part of its IT services.

“What Mongo is able to give us is uptime at a very large scale,” Broyles said. “The biggest thing for us is resiliency at that data layer. We currently have 9 million-plus vehicles, we’ve serviced 5 million calls. We needed to know that the platform could scale for us.”

While scale may be important for an emergency response service, uptime is critical as well. When Toyota set out to build its emergency response service, the company knew that traditional windows of downtime to perform upgrades or data migrations would not work.

“One of the pillars for the team was we don’t want any downtime for our customers,” O’Dell said. “Doing a migration isn’t an excuse to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to take it down for 15 minutes or an hour.’ No downtime at all.”

With the current momentum behind enterprise use of generative AI, its application for roadside service is among the list of technologies being reviewed by O’Dell, Broyles and the rest of the team at Toyota Connected North America.

“On the back end there are some things we could do from a generative AI perspective…bringing in documents and automatically approving things that we have to do today, police reports, things like that,” O’Dell said. “There’s some opportunity there for generative AI to potentially assist our Safety Connect agents. We’re definitely looking at that.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE