Human factors account for 90 per cent of truck accidents and as Australian regulators drag their feet on mandating the latest safety technologies for heavy transport, manufacturers are racing ahead to standardise these features.
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For nearly seven years, all new heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) sold in the European Union have had to be equipped with lane departure warning systems (LDWS) and autonomous emergency braking systems (AEBS), the latter a feature which automatically brakes the vehicle if the onboard system detects the driver has not reacted to a potential collision ahead.
In its 2018 action plan on safer trucks and trailers, the Heavy Vehicle Industry Association revealed it takes 20 years for changes to Australian Design Rules - that is, the mandating of key safety features - to flow across Australia's truck fleet because so many trucks - over 70,000 driving around now - are between 15- to 22-years-old.
To modernise the fleet the association has called on governments to set the example "by utilising their tenders for major transport and infrastructure projects to encourage the take-up of safety technology".
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Truck manufacturers, particularly the Europeans, are doing their part but when a new Mercedes, Volvo, MAN or similar-sized prime mover costs well in excess of $220,000, it's little wonder the take-up is slow, particularly among owner-operators.
Safety tech commonly available on passenger cars for many years is now quickly appearing on heavy vehicles.
Radar-operated cruise control and lane keeping systems, supported by cameras which track the road centreline, are now so well-developed that trucks can almost steer themselves.
But even the most basic of safety items - collectively known as forward collision mitigation - are still parked in the loading dock of Australia's heavy vehicle regulatory environment.
A study by Monash University found that mandating autonomous emergency braking systems (AEBS) on trucks would produce the largest percentage reduction in fatal heavy vehicle crashes. Last year the federal government announced AEBS would be mandated on light vehicles by March 2023 but was ambiguous about its plan for heavy vehicles. Mercedes-Benz Australia introduced AEBS first on a heavy truck way back in 2010 and the feature is now standard across all its truck models.
Blind spot monitoring is a hugely important issue with trucks operating in urban environments with the US-style high-bonneted heavy vehicles offering a much-reduced level of forward visibility.
The cab-over design is favoured for heavy vehicles which predominantly spend more time in urban environments. Specialised urban heavy vehicles, such as garbage trucks, feature deep and wrap-around cabin glass, the driver's view around the truck supported by multiple cameras.
Cameras and light detection and ranging (LiDAR, which uses pulsed lasers) provide the additional "eyes" for truck drivers on urban roads and in dicey weather conditions. Some camera set-ups, like the Mercedes Sideguard Assist, watch the the "blind" left-hand side of the cabin for any movement.
Electronic stability control (ESC) has been standard on Australian passenger cars for years but there's greater complexity in applying it to heavy vehicles.
In practical terms, ESC acts to reduce engine torque to the driven wheels, and controls wheel braking individually which, on a heavy truck and trailer, is air pressure-modulated. It acts to prevent both understeer - which is when the vehicle wants to "push" ahead and not turn into a corner - and oversteer, in which the the rear end of the vehicle breaks traction before the front, often resulting in jack-knifing.
Trailer companies have developed a range of inbuilt safeguards and a simple form of machine intelligence, called an adaptive learning loop system, offers one solution. These inbuilt control systems "learn" how the combined prime mover and trailer are tracking on the road by calculating the trailer's lateral acceleration, speed, air suspension and air system pressure 100 times per second.
As manufacturers use technology to reduce the in-cabin error rate and work at addressing the trigger factors which may cause it - driver fatigue being the most common - there are wider on-road programs which will allow operating efficiency to increase, and in doing so remove driver input from the task completely.
Connectivity is seen as the next crucial step in making that happen.
Pushing a truck through the air accounts for around 25 per cent of its fuel consumption and "platooning" multiple heavy vehicles, matching each others' speed and braking on a highway, delivers potentially massive fuel savings and much-reduced emissions. But it needs scalable and reliable wireless communications between vehicles and a safety focus as laser-sharp as the commercial aviation industry.
The proponents of platooning say safety must be paramount. But the concept of a predictable, single file of heavy trucks linked together electronically can only function on a dual lane highway. In almost any other situation, it would just create frustration for other road users.
Connectivity between all vehicles has clear safety benefits and this is where V2X (vehicle-to-everything) or V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure) technology offers a solution.
For instance, imagine a road network where any unseen hazards ahead are identified known long before they are encountered, and in which semi-trailers rolling down the highway night and day are harvesting a wealth of road condition and hazard data with every kilometre travelled, then sharing it with every other road user around them.
But it's a long, slow journey to achieve V2X with the privacy protocols needed to make it happen only to be approved by the European Union, Japan and South Korea from July this year.