Shane Williams is always on the lookout for dead kangaroos. He keeps a can of red spray paint and a pillowcase in the car, just in case he finds it on the side of the road.
When Williams spots the cub, she jumps out of her car to check for the orphaned joey, which may still be in its now-dead mother’s pouch. He then sprays the adult with a large pink cross to let drivers know the body has been searched. If Williams, the founder of Bridgetown Wildlife Rescue, finds a baby, she’ll hang it in a pillowcase in the car for the drive home. Sometimes, she said, when animals are too small to generate heat on their own, “you just put them right on top.”
Williams has had plenty of opportunities to perfect her technique, as kangaroos are one of the biggest traffic threats in Australia.
Dangers to wildlife
The National Roads and Drivers Association of Australia estimated more than 12,000 of its insurance claims in 2018 were from kangaroo-wallaby collisions, accidents costing more than AUD$5000 on average.
Over the past 20 years, car companies have turned from old strategies of structurally strengthening cars to designing preventative technologies that avoid crashes altogether. Car companies and researchers have spent years trying to create systems to detect or deter animals. But until now marsupials have posed an almost impossible technological challenge, leaving communities to come up with alternative solutions to keep shelters away from busy roads.
One problem is that collision avoidance systems for large wildlife were originally designed with an entirely different animal in mind: moose. Wildlife collision technology began in earnest due to the increasing number of moose accidents in the Nordic countries. These accidents are serious, and if they happen, the sheer weight of the animal—sometimes over 1,200 pounds—causes extensive damage to the vehicle, elk, and people.
To mitigate these brutal impacts, Magnus Gens, a master’s student in vehicle engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology KTH teamed up with Saab, a Swedish car company, to investigate how their cars can protect drivers in the event of collisions with wild animals. For his thesis, Gens built a life-size moose dummy – made of 116 bright red rubber discs – to test on Saabs and Volvos. The dummy mimicked fatal moose crashes, which are especially dangerous when the mammal’s body mass rolls directly into (and through) a car windshield.
Saab’s involvement in the project and continued wildlife testing protocols have built its reputation as a maker of moose-resistant vehicles, while Gens won a long-overdue Ig Nobel Prize for its research last year.
Volvo, however, was the first on the market with a large animal detection system, which debuted in 2016. It is unique because it precisely detects and brakes mammals when the driver does not have time to react manually. The system is equipped with a camera and radar that track how far away the animal is using the ground as a reference point. The program can detect elk, moose, horse and deer. But he can’t understand kangaroos.
Completely irrational animals
That’s because kangaroos are completely irrational animals, said David Pickett, Volvo Australia technical manager. In 2015, Pickett was part of a Volvo team that attempted to develop the world’s first kangaroo detection and avoidance system by a major automaker.
Pickett and a research team from Volvo headquarters in Sweden traveled to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve near Canberra, Australia, where they spent a week driving up and down winding roads, watching their detection system try to detect kangaroos.
“We were able to drive through Tidbinbilla, looking over and recording what the car saw, and watching how the car would react,” Pickett said. “Well, the car didn’t respond.”
It soon became clear that detection on the ground would not work for animals with such a cheerful disposition. In full flight they look completely different than when they are resting and they are fast. They jump in unpredictable ways, maneuver in the air to confuse and escape predators.