The Road Angel

It's raining and dark, the empty country fields blurring past the windows lit only by a half-moon. You're on an unfamiliar road and feeling tired: it's been a long day of driving. A corner looms and you make the steering input. Your mind is vaguely on the job, but most of its attention is on the motel where you'll spend the night. Should you give them a call to make sure that reception will still be open when you lob in? And which motel was it, anyway? Was it Seaview or Bayview? Or maybe that was last night's... Hope that they have decent coffee at this place, anyway. Not that powdered International Roast stuff...

Suddenly your attention is switched back to the road: the corner is tightening dramatically and you've left your correction too late. You yank on some lock and feel the tail let go. The white line slants at a weird angle through the windscreen and the roadside reflectors become abstract red and white blurs. There's a thump as the wheels drop off the edge of the bitumen, a moment of tingling anticipatory nothingness, then an impact which throws you sideways in your seat. You're unhurt, the car down in the ditch up against a tree. The engine is still running and you mechanically reach forward to turn off the ignition. Then there's just silence.

Feeling sore and bewildered, you reach for the door handle and get out. And there, right behind the car and standing proudly unscathed, is one of those black marker posts with a cross on it - someone else has made the same mistake, but they paid for it more dearly...

Now run the same situation, but this time add the Road Angel. Approaching that corner its LED speed display would have turned red and started flashing. A beeper would have been activated as bars on the display counted down your approach. This blackspot, where someone else has died, would have been no surprise to you - and with that forewarning, you'd have been jerked from your lethargy, your attention switched back to the road and your speed slowed. You wouldn't have crashed.

In the right situation the Road Angel's AUD$995 price looks downright cheap...

A small black device sitting on the dash, the horribly-named Road Angel uses in-built GPS satellite navigation so that it always knows where it is. The device also has a large memory into which permanent speed cameras, blackspots, school speed zones and the like are held. As you approach any of these areas, the Road Angel gives you a specific warning: an LCD label describes the category and the beep alters to match. To keep the listing updated, on a regular basis you plug the device into your PC and download the latest information from the company's website. The user can additionally program in the warnings that they believe to be necessary, and this information is added (after checking, it is said) to the listing that everyone else gets. It's a fascinating concept - but does it work?

The answer to that is 'yes', but only in some driving situations. Take your commute to work. You've done it what feels like a thousand times and know the route inside-out. You know the odd camber of that corner, you know how the bitumen in front of that set of traffic lights is day by day getting more polished, you know where the school speed zones and permanent cameras are. Despite claims to the contrary, the Road Angel has almost nothing to offer you.

To gain the greatest benefit you must be on an unfamiliar road - and of course the information that is being given to you by the Road Angel must be accurate. You don't want to be warned of every corner, nor do you want to be told only when passing a spot where dozens have died over the last few decades. Instead you need a balancing act - and that's completely dependent on what has been programmed into the device.

We tested the Road Angel on the roads around the Gold Coast, and there - on the main routes, at least - the information was of high quality. The Road Angel beeped an adequate warning coming up to traffic lights where - as we know from experience - traffic banks up around a corner (the likelihood of tail-end collisions high), and also warned of redlight and permanent speed cameras. However, get off those main routes and the Road Angel remained mute even when coming up to corners which are tricky and deceptive.

The company importing the UK-made Angel - Sentinel Media Pty Ltd - has relied on accident statistics as well as employing on-the-road checkers to assemble the information that's currently stored. (As mentioned earlier, once more Road Angels are being used and individually programmed, this information base will rapidly grow.) So it kind of makes sense that less heavily traffic'd routes will have less warnings - even though the danger to individual drivers may be as great, the reduced traffic will mean that fewer accidents have actually occurred. So away from main roads the warnings are far less useful - basically, at this stage on our test roads there weren't any.

Of course, even on less populated thoroughfares, you can put in your own warnings - it's just an easy two-button process. But unless you're lending your car to another driver (or swapping the Road Angel to someone else's car, a process that takes about 30 seconds), the warning that you've just programmed-in won't be very useful - not unless you forget about the danger spot by the time you next drive that way.

However, we can think of plenty of drivers for whom the Road Angel would be extraordinarily good. Take a couple caravanning around Australia. Not only are they always on unfamiliar roads but with the weight of the van on the back, their vehicle can corner and brake less effectively as well. Similar benefits apply to truck drivers, or any other long distance drivers who are frequently on unfamiliar routes.

The Road Angel also warns you to slow for permanent speed cameras - but since in many states these are signposted and most revenue collection is from mobile cameras (of which there's no warning), this benefit isn't quite all that it's cracked up to be. And although the publicity claims warning of roadworks, school zones and the like, we didn't notice any of this type of indication - even when the roadworks had been taking place on a main road for months.

In addition to the warnings, the Road Angel can also be used to read out your instantaneous latitude and longitude - perhaps to relay to rescuers by phone after an accident or breakdown. The warnings are all user programmable with a range of options, and installation is dead-easy - just suction-cap the device to the windscreen and plug it into the cigarette lighter (or install permanent ignition-switched power if you want). However, a warning in the handbook suggests a max temp of only 60 degrees C, so leaving it permanently on your dash in Australian heat isn't a good idea. Updating the information is via a serial port connection to your PC; in addition you need to download some software to allow the process to work. The updates are free for the first year and then AUD$95 per year (or AUD$149 per two years) after that.

The Road Angel is an interim step on the way to future GSM-updated navigation systems that not only warn you of real-time dangers, but also can optionally direct you around them. However, unlike such systems, the Road Angel is here now. It's easy to use - albeit a little clumsy to update - and easy to install.

For drivers who are frequently on unfamiliar roads, it could be a literal lifesaver.

www.blackspot.com.au

The Road Angel was loaned for this review by Sentinel Media.

Speed and Position The Road Angel displays road speed continuously, to 1 km/h resolution. In effect, it is an externally referenced digital speedo, which you could expect to have excellent accuracy. However, it is really only usable at steady speeds (eg to check the accuracy of your car's speedo) because during acceleration and braking, the Road Angel display noticeably lags behind. The serial port used to connect the Road Angel to your PC for web data updates can also be configured to output live GPS data, presumably for sister products yet to be released.

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