Brief Explanation

HP Lubricants has always championed the cause of road safety in India. But we realised, to be able to truly live this purpose, we need to solve the problem of road safety, rather than just talk about it. While on this subject, we discovered that 63% of all accidents in India take place on U-pin bends. Most of these are highways in hilly regions.These are 726 blind spots which are most prone to accidents. For this project, we set out to solve the problem of collisions at these 726 blind spots. The sound of a honk which can be a nuisance in the city, turned out to be a solution for us on these narrow, hilly roads. We understood that the truck drivers on these roads communicated with each other by sounding the honk, thereby avoiding collisions. However, on a U-pin bend you are unable to see anyone coming from the other side, therefore you don’t honk and you collide. We put our first SmartLife pole at Kassal Morh on Jammu-Srinagar highway, one of the deadliest roads in the world . This particular bend alone accounts for 65-80 accidents every year on the highway. Barely a few weeks after we installed the SmartLife pole at this bend, the number of accidents came down to zero! The Roads That Honk campaign became a massive road safety movement across the world. Key cultural and political influencers extended support to our initiative. The minister of petroleum & natural gas of India, Dharmendra Pradhan, lauded our innovative solution. Within the first 10 days of launch, we generated 105 million media impressions and 15 million reach on Facebook and Twitter. We were covered by mainstream media across the world such as BBC. We were picked up by Buzzfeed, Quora, CNET, Gadget 360, ET Auto and numerous other Auto-tech publications. Apart from triggering a massive global conversation on road safety, we also demonstrated the scalability of SmartLife Poles. HP Lubricants is now installing this technology for the National Highway Authority of India in three other states in India. Even the governments of Saudi Arabia and Nepal aim to adopt the SmartLife poles across their countries. The goodwill created through this campaign helped ease HP Lubricants’ entry into newer markets.