Waze and Shell have teamed up to provide a warning service for places where people are more likely to run into trouble. For two months, a Shell sponsored pop up will appear on the Waze dashboard when drivers are approaching one of 50 accident prone locations across peninsula Malaysia.
Of course, random popups can also be a distraction; which is why the warning will only appear when the car is completely stationary. Because Waze cannot tell when people are going to stop before approaching the areas, the notification will appear within a 5km radius.
The accident prone areas were identified using crowdsourced data from Waze users. The data itself is drawn from the first quarter of 2017. It sounds like a very limited amount of time, but Waze says that Malaysians submit so much information that this limited amount of time is more than enough to observe traffic trends.
Ideally, warning the public about these locations will reduce the number of accidents; seeing that drivers should be more vigilant and avoid running into anything. This, in turn, should reduce the number of traffic jams during this period.
During this same time, Shell is also offering an oil change promotion through Waze; and over YouTube. This promo code entitles drivers to a RM30 discount on their next oil change at participating workshops.
The alerts will run from 15 May to 15 July. It technically means that the campaign has already begun, and those who haven’t seen it have probably not gone anywhere near these trouble spots.
