Potholes are a pesky problem—just ask scooter company Lime, which listed them as an official risk to its business in its IPO filing last week. History is littered with claims that technology can help solve or blunt the problem of potholes, and still they persist.
But as cars become increasingly laden with advanced sensors, they are becoming a tool that can quickly alert cities to potholes and other municipal problems. Last month, Waymo and Waze announced a pilot program to share pothole data with local governments. Now, fleet management company Samsara says it’s one-upping that idea with its own AI-powered offering called “Ground Intelligence.”
Samsara has spent the last decade giving its customers cameras to mount inside millions of trucks for driver monitoring, theft prevention, and helping with liability claims. The San Francisco-based company has taken all that data and trained its own model that can detect multiple different types of potholes and determine how quickly they are deteriorating.
The idea is that Samsara-equipped trucks are far more prevalent than Waymo’s robotaxi fleet, which currently stands at just around 3,000 vehicles. Even as that number grows, Samsara believes it will be able to collect more data and, crucially, more repeat data from the same locations that show how potholes change over time.
Typically, cities have to either dispatch workers or sift through hundreds of 311 calls to find these problems. It’s a lot of noise. Samsara’s pitch is that it can deliver the signal, and quickly, because of the sheer number of commercial trucks and vans that already use its cameras.







