Having Your Car Call For Help After An Accident

Some telematics services, like OnStar, will be alerted if your airbag goes off, but a new service in Europe tries to go a bit further. The system, developed by ERTICO, a transport research organization based in Belgium, uses GPS to determine your location, and then phones the local emergency line and states a message in the local language. The system can also let the driver (if conscious) communicate with the emergency officials via a microphone and speaker. In addition to calling the emergency line, it will also provide additional information about where the vehicle is, the vehicle's make, model, color and license number, as well as the vehicles heading when it crashed (so emergency response teams know which side of a highway it is on).