Tokyo: Fire departments across Japan, Toyota Motor Corp. and others are working together to promote a system to automatically recognize the location of an approaching ambulance and make it easier for drivers to give way to the emergency vehicle.

The number of cases of emergency patients being transported to medical institutions by ambulance has been rising year by year, exceeding seven million for the first time in 2022. The envisioned system is expected to make ambulance operations more efficient.

When an ambulance equipped with the system approaches, a buzzer goes off in vehicles, and the direction from which the ambulance is coming and the distance to the emergency vehicle are indicated with arrows and numbers on the onboard display panels. It can detect an ambulance within 150 meters.

“Many drivers tend to be late in giving way to an ambulance when they hear a siren of the vehicle while driving because they aren’t sure from which direction it is coming, so I wanted to do something,” said a Fire and Disaster Management Agency official who was involved in the development of the system.

The agency and others conducted a test of the system on major roads in Nagoya, the capital of Aichi Prefecture, central Japan, and elsewhere in fiscal 2018. The result was that even when ambulances were not seen directly at an intersection, drivers were able to stop their cars early after hearing the buzzer, and the driving time of the ambulances was reduced by 7.7 pct on average.

“I could give way to the ambulance earlier than other drivers because I understood the direction from which it was coming,” one driver who took part in the test said.

But the system is effective only after it is installed on both ambulances and other vehicles, and spreading it to more and more vehicles is a key challenge.

Only 15 pct of the 6,549 ambulances deployed at fire departments across the country were equipped with the system as of April 1, 2022.

Cars with the system as standard equipment are limited to some high-end models of Toyota. Installing it as optional equipment costs nearly 30,000 yen.

“The system is increasingly becoming known. We want people to know more about its convenience,” a Toyota official said.

Toyota also hopes to spread the system among hearing-impaired drivers. On “Ear Day” on March 3 this year, the company promoted the system on Twitter, saying, “You can notice an ambulance with your eyes.”

JIJI Press