Anti-Crash Systems Proliferate as Fleets See Safety Benefits

This story appears in the Jan. 23 print edition of Transport Topics.

Trucking industry adoption of onboard anti-collision systems appears to be gaining steam after years of resistance, according to industry officials.

The latest evidence of interest in such safety systems came last week, when it was announced that Schneider National would be buying 2,500 of the units for its new truck purchases in 2012 and eventually would outfit its entire 10,000-tractor fleet.

“Crash avoidance systems have the potential to be a real game changer in heavy trucking safety,” Russ Rader, spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Arlington, Va., told Transport Topics.

“Deployment of active safety technologies that sense and act to assist the driver under some scenarios is the future,” Dave Osiecki, senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs at American

Trucking Associations, told TT. “It will bring the next wave of safety improvement in trucking. If the technology is mature, and it works, fleets will adopt it for the safety benefits and [return on investment]. We’re witnessing that now with some active technologies, and it’s exciting.”

Rader said the insurance institute, an independent, nonprofit, scientific organization, did a 2010 study that “showed that forward collision-avoidance systems could prevent more than a third of large truck front-into-rear crashes. With so many fleets now putting them on the road, we’ll study it more to see if they live up to be as advertised.”

The radar-based systems are designed to identify moving objects in the path of a truck and apply the brakes automatically — if the driver fails to respond quickly on his own — in an attempt to avoid a crash, or at least to lessen its severity. Industry officials said the systems are gaining popularity because fleets that bought the systems early have had fewer accidents.

“We have seen a clear downward trend in rear-end incidents since we started putting the OnGuard systems on our trucks,” Dean Newell, Maverick USA’s vice president of safety, told TT.

Newell was referring to Meritor Wabco’s OnGuard Collision Safety System, the same unit Schneider National is putting on its trucks.

“This is an [original equipment manufacturer]-installed system that has to be installed on new trucks only,” Don Osterberg, Schneider’s senior vice president for safety and security, told TT.

“This will be a multiple-year capitalization, over the course of which we will introduce the system to all of our more than 10,000 trucks,” Osterberg added.

“Our crash frequency reports say that rear-end collisions are among the most common accidents,” Osterberg explained. “Rear-end collisions often have the highest severity and fatalities as well.”

The two largest companies offering versions of this “active,” look-ahead technology are Meritor Wabco, a joint venture of Meritor Inc., Troy, Mich., and Wabco, Brussels, Belgium, and brake supplier Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems, Elyria, Ohio.

Another approach to collision- avoidance and mitigation comes from vendors, such as Mobileye Inc. They use cameras and visual- recognition software and then provide visual and audio warnings to drivers.

Maverick USA, Little Rock, Ark., began buying OnGuard in 2010.

“We wanted an active — not a passive — system, so that when it was ready for release, we were one of the early adapters,” Michael Jeffress, Maverick’s vice president of maintenance, told TT. “Ours is always active, rather than just working when cruise control is on.”

“We’re putting them on all new trucks that we now order. We have 700 to 800 with them already,” Jeffress said.

“We won’t have a complete study finished until next year, but our rear-end accidents were at a rate of 0.09 per million miles in 2008, and they went down to 0.06 per million miles in 2011,” Newell added.

Maverick ranks No. 96 on the for-hire TT 100, with more than 1,000 tractors.

Mark Melletat, director of field operations at Meritor Wabco, said the company had sold 17,000 units of its system in North America since the introduction in 2007, not including the Schneider order. “We’ve already got an order board for another 10,000 this year, and that’s growing,” he said.

T.J. Thomas, director of marketing and customer solutions for controls at Bendix, said the company has seen “significant growth since launch in 2009” for both its Wingman ACB and Wingman Advanced systems.

“We expect that trend to continue into 2012 and beyond,” Thomas told TT, although he said company policy prevented the release of numbers.

“We have many large fleets currently using Wingman Advanced that have not yet given us clearance to mention them,” Thomas said, adding that Saia Inc. was one large customer he could mention.

Thomas said that Bendix’s customers also saw financial advantages, beyond reducing the human toll, for including Wingman on new trucks.

“For example, a fatal accident can cost a carrier $3.5 million, but if the crash could be mitigated to just injuries, it could cost just a few hundred thousand dollars, and if only damages, then maybe $10,000,” Thomas said.

Patrick Mikell, Saia’s director of maintenance, said the company began adding Wingman to all its new trucks in 2011.

“These are being installed on Navistar trucks,” Mikell added. “We already have 450 running in our fleet, and we’ll be putting 350 more into the fleet in the first quarter, so we’ll have about 800.”

Mikell said that company plans to put it on all of its trucks through turnover. Saia, Johns Creek, Ga., has more than 1,800 company-owned tractors and ranks No. 23 on the for-hire TT 100.

“Con-way Freight currently has 2,009 Freightliner Cascadias with the Meritor Wabco system,” Con-way Inc. spokesman Gary Frantz told TT.