Integrated Safety Systems Get High Marks From Drivers Who Participated in Testing

This story appears in the Sept. 13 print edition of Transport Topics.

Truck drivers who participated in a test of a five-year, mostly federally funded program to develop integrated crash warning systems said the prototype technology helped them avoid accidents, but they said the frequent false alarms were “annoyances.”

The Integrated Vehicle-Based Safety Systems program got high marks in a newly released report summarizing 10 months of on-road testing by 18 Con-way Freight drivers, who last year logged more than 600,000 longhaul and local miles out of the company’s Detroit service center.

The testing involved 10 Con-way Class 8 tractors equipped with integrated forward crash, lateral drift and lane change/merge warning systems developed by Eaton Corp. and Takata Corp.

The systems, which normally work independently of each other, were integrated to prioritize and alert the driver of the most dangerous crash threat when several threats occurred simultaneously.

The test trucks also were instrumented to capture information on the driving environment, driver behavior, integrated warning system activity, and vehicle kinematics data. Subjective data on driver acceptance were collected in a post-test and driver debriefing.

Each of the crash warning systems currently is on the market individually, and an integrated version of the three systems has yet to be available commercially, said James Sayer, an associate research scientist with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. UMTRI oversaw the project for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Sayer said the key test findings were encouraging and that safety system manufacturers are interested in seeing the data developed during the $34 million program.

Con-way was so impressed with the testing results that it is installing, at an additional cost of $5.4 million, individual technologies to provide rollover stabilityfront-collision warning with adaptive cruise control, and lane-departure warning on 1,300 of its new Freightliner Cascadia tractors.

Robert Petrancosta, Con-way Freight’s vice president of safety, said his company is in discussions with two warning systems manufacturers and that he expects the integrated technology to become available in the “near future.”

“The IVBSS project really gave us a greater comfort level that this type of investment will have great return for us and certainly help prevent our drivers from being involved in as many serious accidents in the future,” Petrancosta told Transport Topics.

But Petrancosta added that even the individual crash warning systems are not yet proven.

“We need a little more time and more miles for us to do a complete return-on-investment study on the technology,” Petrancosta said.

Despite a higher-than-anticipated false alarm rate, the truck drivers in the test were “nonetheless still accepting” of the system, Sayer told TT.

“Fifteen out of the 18 drivers [participating in the system testing] stated that they believed the integrated system will increase their driving safety,” concluded the UMTRI final report. “Drivers reported that the integrated system made them more aware of the traffic environment, particularly their position in the lane, and seven drivers stated that the integrated system potentially helped them avoid a crash.”

That awareness probably played a significant role in the fact that there were only two minor accidents during the 10 months of testing, according to the report.

During the course of the testing the drivers collectively drove 601,844 miles, made 22,724 trips, and were behind the wheel for 13,678 hours.

Despite the high approval rating, many drivers said they were “distracted” or “annoyed” by the number of false warnings.

The overall rates of warnings heard by drivers were 3.3 per 100 miles for the forward-collision warning system, 13 per 100 miles for lane-departure warning and 2 per 100 miles for lane change and merge warning. The rate of invalid warnings was 1.8 per 100 miles for forward crash, 1.6 per 100 miles for lane departure and 1.6 for lane change, the report said.

“Driver acceptance, while favorable, would almost certainly have been higher had invalid warnings due to fixed roadside objects (poles, signs and guardrails) and overhead road structures (overpasses and bridges) that were encountered repeatedly been lower,” the UMTRI report concluded.

Drivers rated the lane-departure warning feature the highest in terms of satisfaction, and second highest in terms of perceived usefulness. They liked the lane change/merge system the least, largely because it had a higher percentage of invalid warnings that drivers received — 86% for linehaul drivers. The drivers also reported increased safety and heightened awareness with lateral warning systems overall.

The UMTRI report said that more than 58% of police-reported, heavy-truck crashes can be addressed through the widespread deployment of integrated crash warning systems that address rear-end, roadway departure, and lane-change and merge collisions.

The next challenge, once the integrated system becomes available commercially, will be to convince the trucking industry that it’s worth the extra cost to install on its fleets, UMTRI’s Sayer said.

The IVBSS program will officially end this month with a DOT- sponsored public meeting of its key findings on Oct. 20, to be held at the Eagle Crest Conference Center in Ypsilanti, Mich.