On the A2 in Leventina, a driver with severe sleep apnoea he had no knowledge of rear-ended a stationary car. An entire family died. He was acquitted. There was no test. Ten years later, there may be one.
On July 26, 2016, on the A2 motorway near Quinto, Leventina, a truck rear-ended a car stationary in a queue. An entire family was killed. The truck driver survived, gravely injured.
The Cantonal Criminal Court commissioned a medical assessment from the Sleep Centre of the Regional Hospital of Lugano. The conclusion was unequivocal: the driver was suffering from severe obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome, a condition he had been entirely unaware of. He was acquitted. No recklessness. No alcohol. No distraction.
Sleepiness, unlike alcohol, leaves no trace at accident scenes. It cannot be measured after the fact. It cannot be prosecuted.
One Swiss motorway among the most heavily trafficked in Europe for international transit. And no available test that could have identified the risk before the accident. Quinto exposed a gap that had not yet been named: sleepiness at the wheel as a measurable risk factor.
In June 2026, just weeks before the tenth anniversary, the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Zurich (IRM Zürich), Drive Awake's scientific partner, published a landmark study in the Journal of Proteome Research: for the first time, sleep deprivation is detectable biochemically through saliva analysis. It is an early laboratory study, still to be validated on real driving. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.5c01064.
The question Quinto left open - how do you measure sleepiness at the wheel? - may finally have a direction of answer.
Drive Awake was born from this question. Not to retry a driver already acquitted, nor to turn a tragedy into communication. But because Quinto represents precisely the problem the project addresses: a real danger, invisible to existing tools, that concerns anyone who shares a road. The danger without a signal.
Quinto is where all our sections and the documentary meet.