Ford's Emergency Assistance impasse

Ed Pleet is Ford's man tasked with introducing a new on-board automated emergency response system to Australia.

As the Director of Ford's Connected Services Group in the Asia/Pacific region, as well as Africa and Europe, Mr Pleet (pictured) was in Australia during the week, on a whistlestop tour to talk with the local media concerning Ford's SYNC system, which will eventually offer Emergency Assistance for Australian customers. 

The Ford exec was diplomatic, but he and his team seem to be facing an uphill battle in Australia to convince local authorities to accommodate the new telematic technology within the existing telecommunications framework. Speaking with motoring.com.au earlier this week, he wouldn't "speak to a timeline" for the introduction of Ford's 'assisted dialer' to the local market, but did say that Ford was "well advanced dealing with local emergency services".

"Emergency Assistance is a great feature that gives our customers a level of safety and security that they want to have," Mr Pleet explained. "The way it works is, if the vehicle is unfortunately in an accident of a certain level of severity – where the airbags have deployed or the fuel pump cut-off is triggered – the system goes into action."

Immediately following activation, Emergency Assist prompts the driver to respond with a Yea or Nay for the system to contact the local emergency services. The driver can choose to cancel the call within a 10-second window, but should the driver be unconscious the system will go ahead with the call. At the emergency call centre the operator or call-taker receives an automated message with GPS coordinates for the crash site.

It was put to Mr Pleet by motoring.com.au that emergency services are more likely to respond faster to a human caller. In peak times it can take police 45 minutes or longer to attend a multi-breaking burglar alarm phoned through from a security monitoring station because the call-taker, the dispatcher or the attending responder have chosen to allocate priority to a crime phoned in directly by the victim.

Mr Pleet acknowledged there has been such a problem in the past, but explained that Ford's system was classified by emergency services in the US as an "Assisted Dialer" and given a higher order of priority over other automated alarms because there was some level of human interaction – even if passively. But Mr Pleet also observed that it was imperative Ford and other companies introducing this type of technology minimise the potential for false alarms, lest the systems be discredited.

Ford has received positive feedback from users right across North America, where the system is already operational. Michael Hicks, of San Antonio Texas, says he owes his life to the telematic system, after his black Mustang overturned on a bridge and landed upside down in a creek at night. Rapidly filling with water, the car could not be seen from the road in the dark. Hicks was unconscious and minutes away from drowning when emergency services arrived, called out by the car's on-board Emergency Assistance system.

Emergency Assistance runs off Ford's SYNC system, which also supports AppLink – a system developed to take advantage of smartphone apps. With AppLink, which is compatible with iPhone, Android and Blackberry operating systems, as is the SYNC system in general, users can operate different apps for such functions as navigation, traffic, worldwide radio (news, weather, etc), office and social media – to name a few.

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