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.