Turn Signals Should Trigger Certainty, Not Risk

Alex Cameron | Sr. Product Marketing Manager

Make Lane Changes Safer With 360 AI Side Vision Assist

Blind spots are a persistent source of fleet risk, and lane changes are where that risk turns into claims.

The NHTSA estimates that unsafe lane changes cause roughly 530,000 crashes and 60,000 injuries every year in the U.S. Commercial motor vehicles are at fault in more than half of them. For fleets, that translates into a steady accumulation of repair costs, downtime, premium increases, and liability exposure that rarely feels catastrophic, until it is.

Side Vision Assist on the Driver•i™ D-810 is built to break that cycle. Not with more video to sort through after the fact, but with an in-cab alert that fires in the moment, when a driver can still choose a safer move.

Blind Spots Are Real. Lane Changes Happen Fast.

Side mirrors help, but they have hard limits. Adjacent lanes disappear in blind zones. Vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians enter the danger area quickly. And drivers are often making the call under pressure — traffic closing in, a short ramp, a tight urban route.

That's why side-impact incidents are so difficult to coach retroactively. The driver's most common response is the most honest one:

"I never saw them."

Fleets can't build a safety program around hindsight.

How Side Vision Assist Works

The system is built around one of the most reliable signals in driving behavior: intent.

When a driver activates a turn indicator, Side Vision Assist checks the adjacent lane using side-mounted cameras. If a vehicle, cyclist, or pedestrian is already there, the driver receives an in-cab alert immediately, at the moment of çdecision, not after the lane change becomes an incident.

This signal-based design matters because it keeps alerts focused on the scenarios that actually generate claims. The system isn't monitoring constantly and chirping at noise. It activates when the driver declares intent to move, and it responds only when there's something in the way.

Why Drivers Actually Use It

Alert fatigue is the quiet killer of fleet safety technology. Drivers tune out systems that cry wolf, and safety teams inherit the fallout: more manual review, less trust in the tools.

Side Vision Assist is designed to avoid that trap:

• Right moment: Fires only when the driver signals a lane change, not during straight-line driving.

• Clear meaning: Not a vague warning. It tells the driver the adjacent lane is occupied

• Lower noise: Signal-based activation filters out most non-events.

The result is a tool drivers are more likely to trust and a safety team that spends less time triaging false positives.

The Business Case: Fewer Incidents, Lower Exposure

Every fleet knows the direct costs of a side collision: body shop bills, a truck off the road, and an insurance adjuster on the phone.

What compounds faster is everything around those costs. A rising frequency of side-impact claims creates operational drag for safety and ops teams. Incidents involving vulnerable road users, vehicles, cyclists or pedestrians can escalate liability and settlement exposure significantly. And when the only data arrives after the collision, coaching becomes reactive by definition.

Side Vision Assist is built to reduce the frequency of preventable lane-change incidents. That's one of the most efficient levers a fleet has for lowering total cost of risk without adding headcount.

Part of a Complete Picture

Side Vision Assist is part of Netradyne’s 360 AI platform on the Driver•i™ D-810, delivering surround visibility with up to eight cameras.

That matters because side risk rarely happens in isolation. Lane changes, merges, turns, and dense urban driving are full-scene moments. The more complete the view around the vehicle, the more confident the driver, and the more reliable the context when your team needs to reconstruct what happened.

Bottom Line

Lane-change crashes are common. Blind spots are real. Mirrors alone aren't enough.

Side Vision Assist gives drivers a concrete advantage: an in-cab alert, triggered by their own turn signal, that tells them when the adjacent lane is occupied. It's prevention at the point of decision, not another video to review tomorrow.

Learn more about Netradyne 360 AI →