Use Case | How an autonomous vehicle company replaced its safety review BI tool with a production Retool dashboard

Operational safety managers at an EMEA-based autonomous vehicle company can now move from fleet-wide intervention metrics to embedded footage of a specific run without opening a second system. A two-tab Retool dashboard in production replaced Looker as the team's primary safety review surface.

What was the safety review workflow before this dashboard existed?

The team used Looker to track safety-critical interventions across the fleet: moments when a human driver took control of an autonomous vehicle during a run. It surfaced counts and filters, but it carried two problems that compounded as the team's review needs became more specific.

The first was density. The Looker dashboard surfaced more than the operational safety managers needed to act on. Finding the relevant signal meant working through noise that belonged to a different audience. The second was footage access. Looker had no in-app playback. When a manager needed to watch the footage of a specific event, clicking the link opened a separate page entirely. The review context broke. They watched the footage, returned to Looker, and rebuilt their position in the table.

For a team whose job is to understand what happened during a specific event, that break in continuity is a structural problem, not a minor friction. It was the design of the tool working against the workflow it was supposed to support.

What does the Retool dashboard replace it with?

The replacement has two tabs:

The Overview tab surfaces the aggregate safety picture: intervention counts for a selected period, safety rate relative to distance travelled, and breakdowns that let managers compare performance across regions, vehicle platforms, environments, and time of day. A trend chart tracks how the count moves across the selected window. A per-model table at the bottom gives the comparison the team needs to assess how each model is performing operationally. Filters for time period, platform, region, and country let managers scope the view to whatever window or geography the review requires.

The Interventions tab is where individual event review happens. Each row in the log corresponds to a specific safety-critical intervention with the metadata needed to identify the event. Expanding a row plays the footage from that run embedded directly in the dashboard at the timestamp of the event. Managers watch what happened without navigating away. The review stays in one screen from the aggregate view through to the footage.

What changed for the operational safety team?

Looker has been fully replaced for this workflow. The dashboard is live in production.

What changed for the safety team is the signal-to-noise ratio. The Overview shows only the metrics operational managers act on. The per-model table gives them the performance comparison they need. Footage is one click away from any record in the Interventions log.

A review that previously required navigating between two systems, and losing context each time footage was needed, now runs end to end in one screen.

If you are evaluating a similar build: a safety operations surface, an event review tool with embedded media, or a production-ready operational dashboard for a regulated environment, get in touch with the Stackdrop team.

FAQ

How was video footage embedded directly inside Retool without navigating away?

The run player is embedded using Retool's native iframe component, configured with the settings required to allow playback from the source URL. No custom component build was needed. The iframe loads at the precise timestamp of the intervention event, so managers land at the moment in question rather than at the start of the run.

Does this dashboard pattern work for non-technical users?

It was a design requirement in this case. Operational safety managers are non-technical. The build decision was to strip back every data point that wasn't directly actionable for their role and surface the ones they do use: fleet-level counts, per-model performance, and footage access. A tool non-technical users can open and operate without training is what production-readiness means in practice for this audience. If you want to understand how Stackdrop approaches governed tools for non-technical teams, the evaluation framework for enterprise Retool builds covers the relevant delivery standards.

Does this pattern apply to other industries where teams review footage alongside event data?

Yes. The structure here, aggregate metrics on one tab and an event log with embedded footage on a second, transfers to any context where operational teams need to move from a summary view to footage of a specific event without losing context. Quality control with inspection footage, logistics incident review, and security operations with attached recordings follow the same pattern. The Retool surface handles the data layer; the embedded player handles the media.