For Meera Naran, the new road safety strategy is a long-awaited milestone after years of campaigning since her eight-year-old son Dev was killed in a motorway collision in 2018.
As ministers unveiled plans to cut thousands of deaths by 2035, they paid tribute to campaigners, Naran in particular, whose son is commemorated with a pledge to mandate safety technology in new vehicles as “Dev’s Law”.
The 2018 crash piled tragedy on her family. Naran’s father was driving Dev to visit his older brother, Neel, who was being treated in hospital.
Returning on the M6, the car halted on what would been a hard shoulder, had it not been converted for use as part of a smart motorway; a lorry ploughed into them, killing Dev. His grandfather died a few years later, suffering from serious injuries sustained in the crash. Neel did not speak or walk for some time after receiving the news, and died in 2024.
Having first campaigned for changes to smart motorways, Naran pushed for action to make all vehicles safer, using technology such as autonomous emergency braking (AEB), where alerts sound and then the brakes are applied automatically if the driver does not slow in time to avert a crash.
She said: “Had the lorry involved had autonomous braking, that collision could potentially have been avoided completely and Dev could have walked out and come home to me that night.
“So Dev’s Law and AEB really has come from that – my whole campaign has been looking at every element, every factor that’s been involved in Dev’s death. That was a major factor involved and I truly think it’s a life-saving-based technology.”
Different types of driver-assistance technology, including AEB, lane-keeping and other alerts, are features of most new cars but are not mandatory in Britain,
Naran, 42, a senior lecturer in clinical pharmacy at Leicester’s De Montfort University, has brought her professional skills to the campaign and stressed the importance of consultation and “separating the emotion from the evidence”.
Meera said Dev (left) had been ‘best friend and cheerleader’ to his older brother, Neel. Photograph: Meera Naran
Local transport minister Lilian Greenwood said the strategy was “built on evidence, but it is driven by the voices of those who have experienced the devastating consequences of road collisions first-hand”.
She paid tribute to Naran for working “tirelessly in memory of her son Dev to champion life-saving technologies”.
Naran said Dev had been “best friend and cheerleader” to his older brother Neel, who had complex health needs including epilepsy. “When he found Dev was gone, he slowly gave up.”
She said her focus had become “waking up every day and using that grief to make something far more important than us and see that change happen”.
She added: “For this government to look at this and not only give their word that they’re going to make that change but to actually see that they have included it in the strategy is really important.
“Campaigning through both their losses has been unbelievably difficult but it was bigger than my grief, it was bigger than me, it was bigger than their story.
“For me it’s going to be a lifelong campaign to reduce road deaths. I don’t want any other family to go through what we have.”
