Overview
- NRW interior minister Herbert Reul says the technology could help prevent crashes and will be considered only with legal certainty and as a supplement to on‑road policing.
- The system records from overpasses and uses AI to flag hand‑and‑phone patterns for officer review, with footage deleted when no violation is found.
- Rheinland-Pfalz shifted from a 2022 six‑month trial that identified about 1,200 suspected phone users near Mainz and Trier to regulated regular operation at the start of 2026.
- Safety organizations including ACV and the DVR back broader adoption to close the large blind spot in distraction enforcement, which police union experts say affects roughly a third of crashes.
- Experts warn of unresolved legal and cybersecurity issues because these tools are not specifically addressed by the EU AI framework, as regional data such as Burgenland, Austria’s 2025 stats show 930 injuries and 4,300 penalties for phone use.