‘Bigger than me’: road safety campaigner whose son died in collision welcomes new UK rules | Transport policy

For Meera Naran, the new road safety strategy is a long-awaited breakthrough after years of campaigning since her eight-year-old son Dev died in a highway collision in 2018.

As ministers announced plans to reduce thousands of deaths by 2035, they paid tribute to campaigners, especially his son Naran, who are credited with promising to make safety technology compulsory in new vehicles as an “Improvement Bill”.

The crash in 2018 brought tragedy upon his family. Naran’s father was taking Dev to visit his elder brother Neel, who was being treated in the hospital.

Returning to the M6 ​​the vehicle came to a halt on a shoulder which would have been difficult had it not been converted for use as part of a smart motorway; a truck hits them and kills Dev. His grandfather died a few years later from severe injuries sustained in the accident. Neel did not speak or walk for some time after receiving the news and died in 2024.

Naran, who first campaigned for changes to smart motorways, has pushed for action to make all vehicles safer using technologies such as autonomous emergency braking (AEB), where warnings are heard and the brakes are then automatically applied if the driver does not slow down in time to avoid a collision.

He said: “If the truck had autonomous braking, this collision could potentially have been avoided entirely and Dev would have been able to get out of there and come to my house that night.

“So the Giant Act and the AEB really grew out of that; my whole campaign looked at every element, every factor that played a role in the Giant’s death. That was an important factor, and I really think it’s a life-saving technology.”

Different types of driver assistance technology, including AEB, lane keeping and other alerts, are feature of most new cars but are not mandatory in Britain.

Naran, 42, a senior lecturer in clinical pharmacy at De Montfort University in Leicester, brought his professional skills to the campaign and stressed the importance of consultation and “separating emotion from evidence”.

Local transport minister Lilian Greenwood said the strategy was “based on evidence but guided by the voices of those who experience first-hand the devastating consequences of road collisions”.

He paid tribute to Naran for working “tirelessly in memory of his son Dev to promote life-saving technologies”.

Naran said Dev was the “best friend and cheerleader” of his older brother Neel, who has complex health needs including epilepsy. “When he realized Dev was gone, he slowly gave up.”

He said his focus is “waking up every day and using that pain to do something that’s much bigger than us and see that change happen.”

He added: “It’s really important for this government to look at this and see that they’re not just promising to make this change, but actually embedding it in the strategy.

“It was incredibly difficult to deal with the loss of both of them, but it was bigger than my pain, it was bigger than me, it was bigger than their story.

“For me, this will be a lifelong campaign to reduce deaths on the roads. I don’t want any other family to go through what we went through.”