How Fleets Evaluate Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
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Safety technology advancements may be embraced — or spurned — by drivers, but increasingly, their effectiveness is being recognized and adoption is encouraged.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has launched a program to increase awareness of the benefits of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is preparing a rule that would require heavy-duty trucks to have automatic emergency braking (AEB).
ADAS, besides AEB, include forward collision warning, lane-keeping assist, adaptive cruise control, camera-based mirrors and blind-spot warning systems.
“The most despised or abhorred technology out there among truck drivers today is automatic emergency braking — AEB,” said Dan Murray, senior vice president of the American Transportation Research Institute. “And it’s because they think the truck takes over.”
In fact, he added, the driver always has the last decision, always has the last action, retaining the ability to accelerate out of a situation if a truck with AEB starts to brake.
Drivers’ receptiveness to safety technologies depends on the specific technology and their understanding of it. Truck drivers favor road-facing cameras and despise cameras aimed at them, Murray said.
(Transport Topics)
“We call them event recorders in an attempt to get away from the negative feeling toward the words camera and video,” Randy Obermeyer, vice president of safety and maintenance for Online Transport, said by email. “Many drivers believe that the camera systems give the safety and operations departments a livestream look at what they are doing. That is not the case though.”
Obermeyer, the Technology & Maintenance Council chairman in 2022, said the only way to see video footage is to request a section of a recording.
“We only do that when we have a safety reason to do so,” he said, “based on events that are triggered by an unsafe action such as unsafe following distance, hard brake applications, crash, inattentive driving, mobile usage, seat belt violation, etc.”
Many drivers come to realize they have developed poor driving behavior only when they get into a truck with safety systems for the first time, Obermeyer said, noting one bad habit: following too closely.
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When the driver operates a truck that has an event recorder with in-cab coaching turned on, “he right away gets frustrated because the event recorder just won’t shut up,” Obermeyer said. If that driver is willing to be coached, “he will start adjusting his following distance so that he can drive in peace.”
Drivers also might need to see video of following-distance events that shows the time gap between their truck and the vehicle ahead.
“In most cases,” Obermeyer said, “the driver had no idea they were that close.”
Adding hard-braking alerts to the following-distance alerts causes the poorest-performing drivers to stick out, he said, adding that fixing the following-distance behavior usually will automatically fix the hard braking.
Madeline Sullivan, product marketing manager for Volvo Trucks North America, said the demands of the job can turn drivers against certain technologies.
She explained that a common criticism of active safety systems comes from drivers who don’t want to feel like the truck is controlling areas such as braking and following distances.
“Which is understandable from their perspective, as they are under tremendous pressure to make stops on time and complete the necessary miles within 11 hours of total drive time per day,” Sullivan said.
As active safety systems continue to take hold, Sullivan said, “More drivers are starting to see the tangible benefits when it comes to protecting their involvement in an accident. Driver feedback is continually considered to ensure that it truly is a driver-assist technology.”
Adoption rates
ATRI is preparing a report on ADAS adoption, aiming for a release in the first quarter next year. Data on industrywide adoption of safety technologies is hard to come by, Murray said. Technology suppliers tend to view sales figures as proprietary data, he noted.
Carriers have shared information on purchase and adoption of safety technologies with ATRI. Trucking operators “are very happy to tell us about it,” Murray said, adding those who are not investing in such technologies don’t answer surveys and phone calls or join focus groups.
Murray noted that it is difficult to extrapolate to the whole industry consisting of nearly 650,000 trucking operators.
“The true scale of adoption is not clear to either industry or government,” he said, adding that despite the challenges, the past two years adoption of safety technologies has plateaued or gone down.
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“The trucking industry has been in a recession for quite some time now,” he said, and it is “probably is not the best economic time to be … contemplating a major investment in safety technology.”
Come an economic upturn, he said, “a lot of carriers are going to start re-contemplating technology purchase decisions.”
To familiarize drivers and trucking managers with the various safety technologies and to accelerate adoption, ATRI, American Trucking Associations, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association Foundation, the Technology & Maintenance Council, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and others are working within a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration program called TechCelerate Now. The program will provide a return-on-investment calculator for users, as part of the effort to spur adoption of the technologies. The calculator will be ready for testing by a group of end users early next year, Murray said.
The ROI calculator in the works is an enhanced version of an earlier model that Murray described as rudimentary. With the initial calculator, users entered data on their trucking company, including number of trucks, and identified the safety technologies they were interested in.
The calculator generated results such as the cost to purchase the technology and potential savings from a reduction of accidents. The new calculator considers more factors, including opportunity costs and interest rates because, Murray said, a lot of carriers would consider borrowing to make these purchases.
Early adopters
Carriers with resources can run pilot programs with various technologies, and they also may test systems or devices of two or three competitors for a defined period and then analyze the results.
“The big guys get the bugs worked out, then buy enough of these [systems] that the pricing goes down,” Murray observed. “The small guys benefit twofold — if they can wait out three to five years of not having the technology.”
Nair
Said Sudhive Nair, ZF North America product line leader for ADAS, brake controls, wheel end and steering: “Active safety is definitely catching [on].”
Truck OEMs and fleets are driving demand for AEB, forward collision warning, adaptive cruise control, rear collision assistance, lane keep assistance and lane centering, Nair said, and take rates are approximately 10%-15%. With a regulation requiring AEB anticipated, the take rate could climb to 25%-30% near the end of this decade, he said.
Nair noted fleets assess ROI on whether and how it influences total cost of ownership. “They want to make sure that the total cost of ownership remains as low as possible.”
At the same time, he said, fleets are mindful of the effect of accidents and the carryover effect on insurance costs.
Promoting safety
Other components makers and truck OEMs said ADAS technology is widespread. Truck OEMs, including Daimler Truck North America and Paccar Inc., pointed out that safety technologies are standard on some of their heavy-duty trucks.
Greg Treinen, vice president of on-highway market development for DTNA said most of its on-highway customers choose Detroit Assurance with ABA5 — the truck maker’s proprietary safety system.
“We anticipate this strong take rate will continue as we prepare to launch Detroit Assurance with ABA6,” he noted, describing the updated version of the system that will be available on the newest Cascadia model in mid-2025.
“Today, fleet conversions are increasingly influenced by firsthand experiences, such as near-miss incidents or witnessing automatic emergency braking events during OEM ride-and-drive demonstrations,” Treinen said, adding that insurance companies are playing a crucial role in promoting adoption by offering reduced premiums for fleets that implement ADAS.
Truck OEMs like DTNA pointed out that safety technologies are standard on some of their heavy-duty trucks. (Daimler Truck North America)
Sullivan, the product marketing manager for Volvo Trucks, said that since 2020 the OEM has seen an overwhelming majority of Volvo trucks sold in North America spec’d with its standard Volvo Active Driver Assist package, which offers automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, and right-hand blind spot detection.
“Active safety ROI really comes down to accident avoidance — the least-expensive accident is the one that never happens. Not only can active safety systems help drivers avoid accidents, but they can also help mitigate the severity when accidents are unavoidable,” she said. “This brings down the overall number of accidents, reduces the direct costs of the accidents themselves, while also reducing downtime.”
Sullivan added that there also is the ROI of driver retention.
“Drivers and their families want them to be in the safest truck possible, so that’s a factor in who they choose to drive with,” she said, adding that the rise of nuclear verdicts will continue and if a fleet can avoid just a single nuclear verdict from an accident, they’ve come out ahead on their investment.
Familiarity with the technologies, improvements in the overall feel and a push from safety departments to include the technologies on new trucks are all driving adoption, Kenworth said in an email statement. Kenworth’s T680, an on-highway truck, is standard with the adaptive cruise control and AEB technology, and the truck maker said it also offers Bendix Fusion on all of its heavy-duty truck models. In the on-highway segment, more than 70% of T680 trucks are taking some form of collision mitigation system, the company said.
(Bendix)
TJ Thomas, director, marketing and customer solutions for Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems, noted that the company’s electronic stability control “serves as the foundational brake system for forward collision mitigation technologies such as Bendix Fusion.” The company also markets Bendix ESP, a stability system.
He said fleet customers that spec those two systems might also spec Bendix BlindSpotter. a complementary side-object detection system.
“We don’t see many examples of BlindSpotter-only fleets,” he said.
Adoption is more tied to the safety culture of any given fleet, regardless of size.
“Usually, the owner or management of a fleet makes a declaration to be the safest possible, which drives spec’ing decisions,” Thomas said.
Joe Vatalaro, PacLease director of maintenance, said active safety technology is widespread , noting many safety features are standard on commercial vehicles.
Paccar heavy-duty trucks are standard-equipped with Bendix Fusion, which includes collision mitigation, following-distance alerts, lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control, Vatalaro said. The current take rate is around 90%.
“My experience is that private fleets, as a whole, choose to spec these safety features often … without breaking the bank,” he said, noting that’s possible because collision mitigation technologies usually bring down the severity level of incidents and/or accidents.
“I also believe that large corporations’ counsels are telling the fleet managers to consider safety technologies when spec’ing replacement vehicles to help insulate themselves from potential nuclear verdicts,” Vatalaro said.
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