Tractor Trailer In-Cab Safety Devices:
Do They Work As Advertised?

In a recent article I read, they mentioned that C.R. England is going to "equip its fleet of more than 3,500 trucks with its Mobileye AWS-4000 safety technology system." According to the article, this device's "camera-based safety features to be installed on each truck will include a lane departure warning system, a forward collision warning system and a headway monitoring and warning system."

Sounds great, right? Not so fast. In theory, these type of devices are wonderful. They will be the "back seat driver" for the truck driver. They will make sure he doesn't fall asleep, doesn't leave his lane by accident, and doesn't approach another vehicle from behind at too fast of a closing speed. So how do they work in practice?

In my experience, there have been two problems with these devices. First problem - the environment is too dynamic for it to be accurate. Things change too quickly and there are far too many variables for the system to try to interpret for an accurate interpretation of your surroundings to be produced by the device. Now if they decide to implement safety systems into the actual roadways themselves or onto vehicles themselves to help facilitate accurate interpretation, that would go a long ways toward making truck driving safer. For instance, using special paint to stripe the roads that vehicles can accurately interpret or maybe RFID tags on vehicles so that these devices can distinguish between vehicles and other objects like bridges, guard rails, and light poles. Which leads to my next problem with these devices - they go off all the time.



There are just far too many "dangers" indicated by these devices. If you spend 10 hours per day driving, and that device indicates a dangerous situation 5 times per hour, 50 warnings is a lot to listen to everyday....especially when only about 5 of the warnings are legitimate. So what does a driver do to compensate for this? Unfortunately, after a short time you just tune-out the warnings. You don't even hear them after a while.

So what should we do about it? Quit making these devices? Of course not. As technology improves, so will these types of safety features. But companies should really be aware of the fact that the practical benefits of such devices at this point in time in rather limited. And more importantly, drivers should be aware of this also.

So as a driver, should you take a job because a company has some new type of safety device in the truck? No. But don't refuse the job either. The driver is the best safety device there is and that won't change for quite some time. Should companies quit buying these devices? No. The more they get used, the more data will be collected, and the more improvements will be made.

Eventually these devices will get much, much better and somewhere down the road they will become a fundamental key to reducing accidents. But I don't see that happening until the roadways are designed with safety features built-in that can interact with the devices in the vehicles. Until then, a word the wise - use the device as best you can for what it's capable of but don't count on it to protect you - it's not going to make things much safer just yet.