Ford, General Motors and Mercedes-Benz are three of the biggest and best-known car brands in the multibillion-dollar automotive industry - and all share the same, but little-known Canberra connection.
All use the same, vital life-saving technology developed in the ACT.
For Seeing Machines chief executive officer Paul McGlone, anonymity is just the nature of doing business with the mega-buck car corporations which re-package and incorporate his technology to sell to the mass market as an integrated package.
Supplier companies, no matter how important their technology contribution regularly take the back seat. How many customers know or care, for instance, that the ground-breaking Mercedes-Benz anti-lock braking system was engineered by Bosch?
"It's the same for hundreds of supplier companies like ours around the world," Mr McGlone said.
"And yes, it is a frustrating - frankly, it kills me - when decades of our company's effort is incorporated within another product.
"But that's business. Companies like Ford, GM and Mercedes are our customers and they call the shots, so that's the harsh commercial reality of the business environment that we operate in."
A tie-up with Canadian automotive supply giant Magna International late last year has Seeing Machines steaming ahead with its automotive partnerships.
Ford brands it as BlueCruise, GM calls it Supercruise and Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot but all three use variations of the complex Seeing Machines occupant monitoring sensing system as a core element of systems which now keep watch over the driver and occupants, and integrate with many other must-have safety features like lane-keeping and radar-operated cruise control.
Simple human error causes the death of hundreds of thousands of people on the road every year and Seeing Machines, which had its genesis in an ANU laboratory, is part of the wave of new technology to prevent it happening.
New safety regulations are coming into force in Europe in 2024, making fatigue and distraction-detecting technology mandatory on all new vehicles.
It's the same across all transport sectors, including heavy trucks and aircraft, with Seeing Machines signing a recent deal with the world's biggest component supplier to the aviation industry, Collins Aerospace, to integrate the ACT tech into its avionics and cockpit systems.
In cars, the simple rear view mirror is simple no longer. The Magna deal repackages driver distraction detection tech behind the mirror in a non-intrusive way which is off-the-shelf accessible to any carmaker which needs it.
"It [the rear-view mirror] is a very effective cabin position to monitor not just the driver, but everyone in the car," Mr McGlone said.
"It has been difficult technically, but it's a very cost-effective solution to achieve the regulatory requirement and integrate with other OEM [Original Equipment Manufacturer] features."
Car manufacturers have years of lead-in engineering and pre-production before the factories begin cranking out cars. But that phase is now over and volumes are growing at the rate of 25 per cent per quarter. Over 900,000 cars on the road now use the company's technology.
"Because we're still in the early stages of these programs with car companies, we know that growth rate is going to increase. So many of the cars using our tech are in the early stages of their manufacturing ramp-up," he said.
"It takes about a year for them [the car brands] to reach their steady-state production volumes."
A range of vehicles using the tech will also be starting production in the course of the next 12-18 months which will be the "next big driver of growth", says Paul McGlone.
As a result of its established strategic partnerships, unlike many companies Seeing Machines is in the enviable position of not having to sell any more product thing more for its growth rate to continue.
While GM, Ford and Mercedes are three of the names users of the tech, there are seven more car brands - protected via commercial-in-confidence arrangements - which are yet to be announced, with a fourth major European brand to reveal its Magna/Seeing Machines tie-up shortly.
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