Truck Makers Work to Improve Interior Safety as NHTSA Reports Rise in Occupant Deaths

This story appears in the Feb. 11 print edition of Transport Topics.

In the wake of a federal safety report that showed a significant rise in truck-occupant fatalities, heavy-duty vehicle manufacturers said that they have been working on ways to improve the safety of their offerings.

In December, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that truck-occupant deaths increased 20% in 2011 — to 635 from 530 the year before. Two-thirds of those deaths occurred in single-vehicle accidents. Injuries to drivers and passengers also increased 15% to 23,000 from 20,000 during the year.

The increases were surprising for an industry that had seen truck-occupant deaths fall steeply in 2008 and 2009 — especially because overall traffic deaths in 2011 were the lowest since 1949, according to NHTSA’s José Alberto Uclés.

But just as surprising to some analysts is that so few original equipment manufacturers include air bags in their vehicles.

Brandon Borgna, media relations manager for Volvo Trucks, Greensboro, N.C., said driver-side air bags are standard equipment on his company’s vehicles. Sean Waters, director of product compliance and regulatory affairs for Daimler Trucks North America, Portland, Ore., said driver-side air bags are optional for customers buying his company’s trucks. And Jerry Warmkessel, marketing manager for Mack Trucks, Greensboro, N.C., said the OEM offers a seat air bag as an option.

However, Steve Schrier, a spokesman for Navistar Inc., Warrenville, Ill.; Jeff Parietti, public relations manager for Kenworth Truck Co., Kirkland, Wash.; and Landon Sproull, chief engineer at Peterbilt Motors Co., Denton, Texas, all said that air bags are not available on their trucks.

“We spent millions of dollars to develop the air bags, and essentially, the marketplace chose not to purchase them,” Sproull said.

Nevertheless, OEMs said they are constantly working to improve the safety of their vehicles.

Waters said that Daimler, which makes Freightliner and Western Star trucks, “was the first original equipment manufacturer to offer safety options such as anti-lock brakes, driver air bags, obstacle detection systems, seat-belt pretensioners and side air-bag systems for rollover protection, as well as a lane-departure warning system, which alerts the driver when the vehicle is drifting out of its lane.”

Frank Bio, Volvo’s product manager, said his company designs the engine and transmission to drop below the cab during a front-end accident rather than crush the driver. The steering wheel also is designed to collapse, and the instrument panel is designed to break apart when making contact with the driver’s knees.

The company also added active braking systems and lane-departure warning systems last year — both are now standard on their vehicles.

Bio said having an integrated system rather than a collection of aftermarket parts reduces driver distractions and enables the company to create a “hierarchy of warnings” that kick in if the vehicle in front is slowing, the distance is quickly narrowing and the driver needs to take evasive action.

“So if a crash is imminent, it’s going to tell him that first,” he said. “It’s not going to tell him that you forgot to turn your turn signal on, and there’s a car in your right-hand lane.”

Sproull said that, two years ago, Peterbilt made disc brakes standard on highway trucks, adding that they offer better stopping distances than drum brakes and have a longer life span.

Peterbilt is a division of Paccar Inc., Bellevue, Wash., which also owns Kenworth.

Sproull said the change in braking systems was motivated by federal regulations that took effect in August 2011 and reduced the allowable stopping distances at 60 miles per hour to 250 feet from 355 feet.

“Within Paccar [for both Peterbilt and Kenworth], we’ve put in a margin of safety, so we’re actually below that [standard, even] in the worst conditions,” he said.

Sproull also said Peterbilt’s new Model 579, introduced in May 2012, was redesigned with 46% more glass for improved visibility and 25% more mirror glass so the driver can see the entire side of the trailer while looking forward.

He added that the cab was designed to reduce the noise level: “A quieter cab provides a quieter ride, which is less fatiguing.”

Schrier said Navistar tests and validates cab mounting structures, sleeper occupant restraints, mounted cabinets and refrigerators in International Truck & Engine Corp.’s vehicles to withstand 20 G-forces.

He said that’s necessary “so that, if something does happen, the driver’s refrigerator is not flying into his head.”

Driver comfort is closely related to driver safety, said Warmkessel, who added that Mack’s mDRIVE automated manual transmission includes a brake control button.

“By pushing the control button while in any gear and at any time, the driver can downshift one gear and engage the engine in the high setting,” Warmkessel said. “When used along with a foot service-brake application, the feature will allow the vehicle to stop more quickly than when using the service brake alone.”

Because air bags are not available in most trucks, seat belts are especially important — but they work only when they are worn.

According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s annual safety belt survey of about 27,000 drivers, usage hit 78% in 2010, up from 65% in 2007 and 48% in 2003. However, 33.8% of the truck cab occupants who died in 2011 weren’t wearing a seat belt, according to the NHTSA report.

Brenda Lantz, associate director of North Dakota State University’s Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, said many variables could contribute to the increase in trucking deaths, including the improving economy, which has increased trucking demand, and a number of catastrophic weather events in recent years that motorists could avoid by staying home, but truckers could not because of delivery schedules.

On the other hand, she said, maybe the rise is simply an unexplainable anomaly.

“Accidents are just that; they’re unpredictable,” Lantz said. “It’s just a sequence of events that happens sometimes that there’s nothing that anybody could have done. It’s just a strange coincidence that something rolls across the road and distracts the driver to look in that direction, and the car’s coming around the curve at the same time.”

American Trucking Associations President Bill Graves told ABC News on Feb. 1, “This uptick is discouraging. I think we’re going to find a lot of it has to do with the congestion we’re experiencing on the nation’s highways, the rebound of America’s economy.”

Ted Scott, ATA’s director of engineering, said the news might add momentum for ATA’s push to increase regulations for truck cab safety.

With no current federal crashworthiness standards for large trucks as there are for passenger vehicles, Scott said, manufacturers rely instead on recommended practices from the Society of Automotive Engineers. MAP-21, the highway funding bill that Congress passed and President Obama signed into law in 2012 also requires NHTSA to research cab safety and determine whether or not standards are needed for structural issues.

But Daimler’s Waters said, “We design and test our vehicles to the most stringent and applicable crash standards.”

Still, with or without those standards, manufacturers said they are using a lot of tools to prevent accidents — including rollover technology, radar and cameras.

Electronic stability control systems, the basis for rollover technology, prevent these incidents by automatically reducing the throttle and applying brakes to individual wheels.

Fred Andersky, director of government and industry affairs for Bendix Corp., Elyria, Ohio, and T.J. Thomas, director of marketing and customer solution for controls, said their company has seen increased demand for that technology. Bendix introduced its version in 2005.

While the company needed five years to sell its first 100,000 units, it needed only 19 months to sell its next 100,000, thanks to industry acceptance and concerns over safety scores calculated by FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program.

The technology, produced by Bendix and its major competitor, Meritor WABCO, is available in trucks made by all Class 8 manufacturers.

Warmkessel said Mack offers a Roll-Tec option.

“In the event a rollover is detected, the Roll-Tec system pulls down the seat to its lowest position, tightens the seat belt and deploys an air bag from the seat bolster. This all happens within a quarter of a second,” he said.

Dean Newell, vice president of safety and training at Maverick Transportation, a division of Maverick USA, Little Rock, Ark., said rollover technology has had a huge effect on rollovers.

“We’ve drastically reduced the severity of our [rollovers]. I only had one . . . last year, and it was a minimal rollover,” he said.

Maverick USA ranks No. 88 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest U.S. and Canadian for-hire carriers.

Volvo’s Bio said future truck radar will know the difference between pedestrians and deer and will determine if an obstruction represents a major hazard or it is simply an empty box.

Then, there is the Bose Ride system, made by Bose Corp., Framingham, Mass., which reduces bumps and vibrations that can cause driver fatigue and chronic pain. Instead of springs and dampers, the system uses magnets and electromagnets to cancel the jarring.

Engineer Jim Parison, chief architect of the Bose system, said the driver is held still while the truck moves, unlike the way seats usually are designed. The seat belt is anchored to the seat and moves with the driver, he said, adding that the technology also can monitor seat belt use.

Parison said the system has been sold primarily as an aftermarket product, but one truck maker, which he said he is not at liberty to identify, has been certified to install it at the factory. He also said Bose is talking to other OEMs about installing it as original equipment.

The next few years will be a period of refinement rather than revolution, said Bendix’s Thomas, but eventually, there will be a great leap forward. And Andersky said trucks will communicate with other vehicles and, in a future intelligent highway system, the infrastructure itself.

But Navistar’s Schrier said, “I don’t know if someone’s inventing a magic bullet right now. I think there’s enough technologies out there that can be refined and improved, and I think that’s where you’ll see a lot of the yeoman’s work is refining and improving the technologies that are out there right now.”