AI is turning connected cars into pothole-finding machines

Potholes are a pesky problem just ask scooter company Lime, which listed them as an official risk to its business in its IPO filing last week. History is littered with claims that technology can help solve or blunt the problem of potholes, and still they persist. But as cars become increasingly laden with advanced sensors, they are becoming a tool that can quickly alert cities to potholes and other municipal problems. Last month, Waymo and Waze announced a pilot program to share pothole data with local governments. Now, fleet management company Samsara says it s one-upping that idea with its own AI-powered offering that it calls Ground Intelligence. Samsara has spent the last decade giving its customers cameras to mount inside millions of trucks for driver monitoring, theft prevention, and helping with liability claims. The San Francisco-based company has taken all that data and trained its own model that can detect multiple different types of potholes and determine how quickly they are deteriorating. The idea is that Samsara-equipped trucks are far more prevalent than Waymo s robotaxi fleet, which currently stands at just around 3,000 vehicles. Even as that number grows, Samsara believes it will be able to collect more data and, crucially, more repeat data from the same locations that show how potholes change over time. Samsara believes this data will be valuable to cities the company announced Tuesday that the city of Chicago is already under contract as a customer and that it will be the first in a series of insights and data points that will be offered in Ground Intelligence. Other potential features include detecting graffiti, broken guardrails, low-hanging power lines, or really anything that we can observe that has relevance to a city, or also to the private sector, said Samsara s vice president of product, Johan Land. Typically, Land said, cities have to either dispatch workers or sift through hundreds of 311 calls to find these problems. It s a lot of noise. Samsara s pitch is that it can deliver the signal, and quickly, because of the sheer number of commercial trucks and vans that already use its cameras. Ground Intelligence works as a dashboard. It proactively populates warnings on a map of developing potholes and other potential problems. It also allows cities to pull anonymized footage from vehicle cameras to confirm citizen reports of downed street signs, clogged sewers, or other public infrastructure problems. "That's the magic here, it takes a process that was reactive and makes it proactive," Land said. "That means that you don't just go and fix one pothole. You plan it out: 'I know where all the potholes are in this area. I go out and I fix one by one, in one sweep.'" Samsara is also thinking up other ways to leverage this moving municipal surveillance network it has built. On Tuesday, it announced a product called Waste Intelligence, which makes it easier for waste management companies to quickly confirm if their customers' trash or recycling was picked up. Samsara also announced a "ridership management" offering, which can help alert bus drivers to "unexpected boarding events," or create a "digital manifest" for school buses. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Sean O'Kane Sr. Reporter, Transportation Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane. You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal. May 27 Athens, Greece StrictlyVC Athens is up next. Hear unfiltered insights straight from Europe’s tech leaders and connect with the people shaping what’s ahead. Lock in your spot before it’s gone. Most Popular Fintech startup Parker files for bankruptcy Anthony Ha Laid-off Oracle workers tried to negotiate better severance. Oracle said no. Julie Bort San Francisco s housing market has lost its mind Connie Loizos Hackers deface school login pages after claiming another Instructure hack Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai Zack Whittaker Google unveils Whoop-like screenless Fitbit Air Aisha Malik Five architects of the AI economy explain where the wheels are coming off Connie Loizos reMarkable s new Paper Pure tablet goes back to basics with a monochrome screen Ivan Mehta

AI is turning connected cars into pothole-finding machines

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