Self-Driving Safety Campaign In NZ Among CIGATs
This campaign was a success due to the fear of death elicited in the students through advertising techniques such as posters and simulations. This is shown by the significant decrease in the percentage of students who drunk-drive, before and after participating in the campaign’s programme in an eight-week interval. The lessons learnt from the successful “Every 15 minutes” campaign are applied to advertise self-driving safety in NZ among CIGATs. China, India, Germany and Australia are the top 4 countries with overseas license holders involved in fatal or injury crashes in NZ.
Overseas self-driving tourists in NZ involved in fatal crashes increased more than twice in 2016 from 1995. It is important to reduce the increasing number of car accidents caused by CIGATs to lower the road traffic fatality rate. We applied our lessons learnt on catchy personal taglines and multi-sensory advertising approach to our proposed strategies - “Stay Safe” Smartphone application and “Rest to be Safe” Rest Stops. These enhance road safety among CIGATs in NZ. The root causes of increasing number of self-driving accidents are fatigue and unfamiliarity with road conditions in NZ. The first root cause is fatigue, categorized into pre-drive and post-drive fatigue. In NZ, fatigue causes one in every five crashes. Pre-drive fatigue is caused by jet lag as 94% of long-haul travellers cannot adapt to a new time zone in a different country. Thus, CIGATs who immediately self–drive after plane rides cannot focus due to fatigue, hindering their mental processing, decision making abilities and increasing risks of car accidents. Post-drive fatigue is caused by continuous driving for long periods without adequate rest.
The towns in NZ are as far as 1145 kilometres apart. This means that drivers can take up to 14. 3 hours to reach their destinations without rest. With the driver's’ reaction time deteriorating after two hours of continuous driving, without any rest, the probability of crashing increases as tired drivers cannot respond promptly before accidents. The second root cause is CIGATs' unfamiliarity with NZ’s road conditions. The road conditions such as different terrains, speed limits and drivers’ seat orientation on roads and cars in NZ and CIGA are represented in a table. CIGATs are not well adapted to the road conditions in NZ as the roads are different from what they are familiar with in their home countries, increasing their likelihood of crashing. Therefore, it is important to promote strategies targeting the root causes of fatigue and unfamiliarity with road conditions to reduce self-driving accidents among CIGATs. To raise awareness and minimize the occurrence of car accidents due to fatigue and unfamiliarity with road conditions among CIGATs, we came up with our advertising campaign by adopting the Duo Safe framework – “Rest to be Safe” Rest Stops and “Stay Safe” Application.
Our first strategy, “Stay Safe” phone application, makes use of the lesson on multi-sensory advertisement approach and digital advertising to target the root cause of unfamiliarity with road conditions in NZ. The second strategy, “Rest to be Safe” Rest Stops, applies the lesson on visual stimulations and strong, personal taglines to target fatigue in CIGATs. Tourism New Zealand supported a “Safe Driving Campaign” advertising the differing road conditions between NZ and the target countries through billboards, posters and social media. However, this campaign only provides messages to remind drivers about the differing road conditions, which are easily overlooked, making it inadequate in promoting safe driving. Therefore, our project complements these messages by making use of multi-sensory approach for drivers to experience realistic driving simulations, effectively encouraging safe driving. "Stay Safe" Smartphone Application comprises of the following features: modules, rest stops, map, sharing experiences and rewards. The modules feature aims to address the unfamiliarity with road conditions that CIGATs face in NZ by applying our lesson learnt on multi-sensory simulation for an authentic learning experience. Smartphone penetration rate has increased rapidly over the years, with an estimated 63. 3%, 39%, 74. 47% and 71. 59% of CIGA’s population respectively to use a smartphone by 2019.
Hence, “Stay Safe” Application is used to reach out to more CIGATs. Our application will be developed by SUSH Mobile, a NZ-based smartphone application developer. "Stay Safe" will be consulted and funded by NZ Transport Agency, as our aim of reducing NZ’s self-driving accidents corresponds with their vision of creating a safe and connected transport system in NZ. The application is advertised by collaborating with Tourism New Zealand website, which is endorsed by the NZ government. Pop up advertisements with the link to download our application and promotional codes for car rental will appear for CIGATs when users select their home countries in the website. Promotional codes attract tourists to download to cut down on travelling costs. We will collaborate with Bargain Rental Cars, hence providing CIGATs with discounts and simultaneously boosting BRC’s reputation.
