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U.K. names new road rule after Indian-origin accident victim
The government's new strategy mandates 18 new vehicle safety technologies.
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Rwittika Chakraborty
- Thu, 08, Jan 2026
- 01:40 EST
- 119
Dev, an eight-year-old Indian-origin boy, who died in a 2018 accident on a busy highway. / devslaw.co.uk/
The United Kingdom has introduced a series of stricter road safety rules on Jan. 7, including Dev's Law, named after an eight-year-old Indian-origin boy, who died in a 2018 accident on a busy highway.
The Department for Transport (DfT) stated that its new road safety strategy will save thousands of lives on roads by dealing with under-influence driving, improving training for young learner drivers, and introducing mandatory eye tests for older motorists.
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It will also make Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) compulsory in new vehicles, an initiative Dev's mother, Meera Naran, has been campaigning for since his son’s death in a road collision over seven years ago.
Naran, an independent road safety campaigner, thanked the Secretary of State for honouring Dev and introducing such measures, and said,
“I welcome this much-anticipated road safety strategy and am pleased to see a number of measures set out to reduce road deaths and serious injuries.”
“I am especially grateful to the Secretary of State for giving me her word that she would honour Dev and recognise the importance of legislative change to adopt the General Safety Regulations, as Dev’s Law and for delivering on that commitment.”
“I look forward to working closely with the department to ensure that the appropriate steps are taken to establish a robust and effective framework,” concluded Naran.
AEB monitors the road ahead, and if the driver does not respond to a potential collision, the vehicle automatically slows down on its own.
Naran believes that a technology like this would have saved her son's life when his grandfather's car was struck by a truck on the M6 motorway in Birmingham.
The government's new strategy mandates 18 new vehicle safety technologies, including AEB and lane-keeping assistance, and it also sets up a new Road Safety Investigation Branch to analyse collision patterns and inform prevention strategies.
The government also mentioned that its strategy aims to reduce deaths and serious injuries on U.K. roads by 65 per cent by 2035, with a greater target of 70 per cent for children under 16.
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