Austria ready for eCall

Creation date: 07 December 2006

The Austrian pilot project on eCall is conducted by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology together with Dolphin Technologies, market expert in security systems and telematics units for cars, the ÖAMTC operation centre and the mobile operator Mobilkom.

In the Austrian simulation eCall infrastructure after triggering an alarm, the ÖAMTC operation centre gets informed by two different ways. It receives an SMS message, which is reformatted into an email and which contains relevant data regarding the driver and the vehicle, as well as the position where the alarm message has been sent from. At the same time a voice call to a special telephone number of the operation centre is triggered, while the integrated voice processor informs about the reason of the alarm (accident, emergency, theft) and the identity of the vehicle.

The test bedding has been scheduled with 100 test drivers with the eCall technology installed on their vehicles: until August 11th 2006 each of these test drivers had to trigger at least 10 alarms by using the emergency button. The test results show that 72% of the eCall alarm messages were answered within two minutes, with a further twelve percent answered within 4 minutes, meaning that in 84% of cases help could have been on the way in less than four minutes.

The Austrian test also investigated the driver acceptance of the system and found out that more than 60% of drivers would agree to pay €9 - €14 per month for an eCall subscription, which would allow them to get prompt support in case of an accident or an emergency. Moreover, almost 50% of drivers were willing to pay at least €300 for the eCall hardware and installation. Most interesting drivers are willing to pay for addition add-on services to eCall, with 71% saying they would pay for breakdown assistance via the system, 61% interested in receiving travel information and 20% willing to receive weather information.

With this pilot project and also with the systems which are already on the road, Austria demonstrated to be prepared for eCall and to take the request from the European Union seriously, by making an important contribution for the security on the road.

More information about Austrian pilot on eCall here.