Ten vehicle manufacturers will add automatic emergency braking (AEB) as a standard feature on all new vehicles, according to the US Department of Transportation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). The ten companies – Audi, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Mazda, Mercedes Benz, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, and [...]
If you’ve been driving a few years, you might have noticed that the highways are becoming more congested. In 1950, there were 15 vehicles in the United States for each mile of road (paved and unpaved). In 2013, that number had increased to 63, a rise of 320 percent. When you look at miles driven [...]
The promise of a future with autonomous trucks took another step forward as the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles cleared Daimler Trucks North America to operate the first licensed autonomous commercial truck on a public highway. Those in favor of autonomous vehicles claim their use will result in fewer collisions and improved fuel mileage. However, [...]
Rewards programs for company drivers can be effective; however, they fail in many organizations because of one fatal mistake: Many companies think that monetary rewards are the only way to motivate employees. Studies have found that employees aren’t motivated by financial incentives alone. Therefore, if you want to create a safety-based rewards program, you need [...]
How's My Driving It’s more than halfway into 2015, and we’ve already seen some devastating collisions involving large commercial vehicles. Let’s review two of them in greater detail. On January 9, 2015, a snow storm with whiteout conditions in Battlecreek, Michigan, led to several pileups on both the east and westbound lanes of [...]
How's My Driving? Ever drive behind a commercial vehicle and notice that its brake lights are not working? Ever see a commercial vehicle with an unbalanced load? You want to tell someone about it, but how? Maybe you drive on, thinking that the driver’s fleet manager will eventually discover and fix the problem. [...]
A recent op-ed in the New York Times chastised the trucking industry and Congress for lax attitudes toward safety. The article, written by freelancer Howard Abramson, who was an executive at the American Trucking Association for 15 years, highlighted some disturbing statistics. For example, this year alone, traffic collisions involving large trucks killed more people than [...]