Stuttgart, Germany - Mercedes-Benz has come up with a simple and effective way of cutting the time it takes to extract the occupants of a car at the scene of a crash – a set of stickers.
Called Rescue Assist, the stickers are placed inside the fuel filler cap and inside the door frame on the opposite side to the fuel-cap; they carry QR codes designed to be read by any enabled smartphone or tablet.
Contained in the QR code is the key information needed by the emergency services to quickly, safely and efficiently extract the occupants without endangering either the individuals involved in the incident or those responsible for their rescue.
The information – covering everything from the make, model and specifications of the car as well as the location of the high-voltage cables in hybrid cars and their associated safety systems – can be accessed far more efficiently through a QR code reader than through the current process, which involves consulting a database and locating the exact model of car.
“It’s going to reduce the amount of time taken to extricate the casualty, which in turn is going to improve survival rates.”
On average the QR codes save about two minutes at the point at which the emergency services first arrive on the scene.
UK Fire Service College training manager Craig Flannery said: “We’d like all cars have QR Codes.”
The QR codes feature on every new Mercedes car and Mercedes-Benz dealers throughout South Africa have been retrofitting them, free of charge, since the beginning of this year to any model built from 1990 onwards.
“If you are driving a Mercedes-Benz and you do not have these stickers on your car yet,” commented product specialist Anne-Kathrin Brown, “I’d suggest that you contact your local dealer to ask about fitment.”
Mercedes-Benz has also decided not to patent the Rescue Assist stickers in the hope that the initiative will be adopted across the automotive industry.