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Today’s vehicles are safer than and that is by no accident. Since the 1960s, car manufacturers have been continuously working to add more safety features to keep drivers and passengers alike, safer inside of automobiles. This process has become two-fold, beginning with trying to safeguard people in the event of an accident and now has transformed into using technology to help prevent them before they even happen. Below are some of the ways manufacturers continue on this quest by expanding on previous advancements and with exciting, new technology.

Adaptive Cruise Control

Adaptive cruise control is an intuitive technology that utilizes the cruise control already equipped in vehicles with sensors and computing power to adjust the speed of your vehicle to go faster or slower according to the speed of the vehicle in front of you. Advanced systems can even slow or stop your vehicle when needed in traffic jams and then accelerate for you as traffic allows.

Forward Collision Warning

These systems are designed to scan the road ahead to alert drivers of a hazard in the way in order to give them more time to attempt to avoid it.  They do this with warning tones, haptic feedback and/or visual alerts to let you know there is danger ahead.

Automatic Emergency Braking

In conjunction, Automatic Emergency Braking systems alert drivers to the dangers of an imminent crash and helps apply maximum braking capacity of the car in order to avoid it. Sometimes referred to as Front Collision Warning Systems, this automation can vary between manufacturers as to what it detects, including other vehicles that are slowing, those that are stopped and with some, even pedestrians.

Blind Spot Detection

Blind Spot Detection utilizes radar sensors to monitor the area directly to the side of the vehicle and behind it, then alerts the driver that there is a vehicle in those locations in order to avoid a collision caused by changing lanes. The alert is commonly showcased with a yellow indicator in the side mirror, lit when it senses a car is in the blindspot and flashes if the turn signal has been activated.

Automatic High Beams

This innovative feature automatically switches your high beams to low when approaching another vehicle regardless if it is in the same lane ahead of you or coming towards you. Additionally, Automatic High Beams will turn your high beams back on after they have passed and no one is ahead of you any longer.

Lane Departure Alert with Steering Assist

Lane Departure Alert with Steering Assist alerts drivers when their vehicle is crossing lane markings by audible, visual or haptic warnings and offers assistance with corrective steering and/or braking from the vehicle automatically.

Rear Cross Traffic Assist

This safety feature assists you while your vehicle is backing up and going less than 5mph. The Rear Cross Traffic Assist system does this by detecting other vehicles approaching from the right and left rear of the vehicle and give you a warning by flashing a warning indicator light in the side mirrors and giving a warning sound.

Rear Automatic Braking System

Rear Automatic Braking Systems help the driver avoid an accident by detecting stationary objects when backing up and gives warnings to the driver, even applying the brakes if necessary to avoid hitting them.

Lane Centering Assist

Lane centering is a similar safety feature to lane departure warning, but rather than simply warn the driver that they are crossing the lane edge, it keeps the car centered in the lane. Together with adaptive cruise control, this feature can allow unassisted driving for a few seconds.

Facial Recognition Software

Facial Recognition Software watches the driver’s face to make sure they have their eyes on the road and if the system detects an inattentive pilot, it will sound an alert and turn off the adaptive cruise control.

Post Collision Braking

This is a passive safety feature which automatically applies the brakes after it detects the airbag sensors have released and that a collision is occurring during the initial impact of a crash. By applying the brakes right away, the system prevents further damage and injury which could occur through the continuing motion of the vehicle due to the crash momentum.

Pre-safe System

It may sound straight out of a science fiction novel but Pre-safe Systems works to prepare and protect passengers in an accident, before it even happens. The system is able to sense when a collision is unavoidable thanks to sensors placed throughout the vehicle, which function with multiple other safety systems. Once an incoming collision is detected, the systems act to prepare you for it by tightening front seat belts, adjusting front head restraints and emitting a “pink sound” to prepare your eardrums for the loud sound of a crash.

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The automobile industry:

Driving safe and sustainable mobility

• Cars, vans, trucks and buses are the cleanest, safest and quietest in the world.
• Automobile industry leads the way in clean production, with decreasing quantities of water and energy used to manufacture a vehicle, and much less CO2 and waste produced in the process.

Moving people

• Cars and buses provide freedom and mobility for all, providing us with direct access to education, health and employment.

Delivering the goods

• Trucks and vans deliver the goods and services we take for granted in our daily lives, carrying 75% of freight transported over land and delivering 14 billion tonnes of goods per year.

Serving the community

• Many of our essential public services – such as postal, waste and emergency services – are delivered by cars, trucks and vans.

Powering economic growth

• The turnover generated by the automotive sector represents 6.8% of EU GDP.
• The automobile industry has ripple effects throughout the economy, supporting a vast supply chain and generating an array of business services.

Creating skilled jobs

• 13.3 million people – or 6.1% of the EU workforce – are employed in the sector.
• The 3.4 million jobs in automotive manufacturing represent 11.3% of EU manufacturing employment.

Manufacturing in Europe

• Vehicle manufacturing is a strategic industry in the EU, where 19.6 million cars, vans, trucks and buses are manufactured per year.
• Automobile manufacturers operate some 304 vehicle assembly and production plants in 27 countries across Europe.

Exporting worldwide

• The auto industry is a global player, delivering quality ‘Made in Europe’ products around the world, and bringing in a €90.3 billion trade surplus.

Generating government revenue

• Motor vehicles account for €413 billion in tax contributions in the EU-15 countries alone.

Spurring innovation

• The auto industry is the largest private investor in R&D in Europe, with almost €54 billion invested annually.
• In 2017, over 8,700 patents were granted to the automotive sector by the EPO.

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Have you heard the one about the chicken and the van?

As a way to get around a 55-year-old 25% tariff on the import of vans or light trucks into the US, carmaker Ford takes a novel approach.

Ford may be an American company, but it makes its smallest van, the Transit Connect, in Spain, exporting tens of thousands of them to the US every year.

To dodge the tariff Ford fits rear seats and windows to the vans going to the US, only to then remove both once they have gone through customs. The makeover from nominal car (just 2.5% import tariff) to van is said to take two-and-a-half hours per vehicle.

The practice has saved Ford $250m (£190m) since the van was debuted in 2002, according to an estimate by US Customs and Border Protection.

The tariff on vans is colloquially known as the “chicken tax”. While this may seem bizarre, it takes its informal name from the fact it was introduced in 1963 in retaliation for the then-European Economic Community (the precursor to today’s European Union) bringing in a tax on US poultry imports.

n introducing the levy, the government of Lyndon Johnson was aiming specifically at German carmaker Volkswagen, which had started to break into the American van market.

Ford’s way of getting round the import tax is a good example of what is known as “tariff engineering” – adapting the item you are importing so that you don’t have to pay any levy. And the company is far from alone in doing it.

In fact, with the US last month imposing tariffs on a further $200bn worth of Chinese products, and China retaliating with levies on $60bn of US goods, we may be about to enter a new era of tariff engineering.

Yet with Ford now continuing a legal battle with US Customs over the issue of it transforming its Transit Connects, authorities do regularly fight back.

Deborah Stern, a trade lawyer at Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg in Miami, says that “tariff classification is as much of an art as it is a science”.

But first, a history lesson. Tariff engineering in the US began more than 100 years ago, in a battle over sugar.

When New York duty collectors discovered that one company had dyed its sugar to secure a lower levy, they weren’t happy.

The case, Merrit v Welsh, went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in the importer’s favor.

The court noted that Congress had applied a colour test to classify the product, not a chemical test.

The product was sold as seen, and the court ruled that an importer could change its product to meet the lower rate of duty as long as there was no “resort to disguise or artifice”.

In other words, if the product – at face value – is as described when inspected, then the tariff engineering in question is legal.

Today there are thousands of examples of tariff engineering.

Take a closer look at Converse trainers imported into the US and you might find they have a fuzzy, fabric material covering part of the sole of each shoe.

In the late 19th Century, US sugar tariffs were based on color. The lighter the shade, the more refined the product, hence the higher levy.

his is because mixing textiles into the soles of athletic shoes qualifies them for the lower duties charged on bedroom slippers in the US. Nike-owned Converse declined to comment.

Other examples of tariff engineering are even more blatant. When anti-dumping tariffs on candles from China were introduced in the 1980s, importers started bringing in wickless wax cylinders with holes drilled into the middle instead, for wicks to be added at a later date.

By importing them as “wax, moulded or carved articles” instead of “candles”, they could legally avoid a 108% anti-dumping tariff.

While the US National Candle Association complained, US Customs said that when inspected at the border the products did not “possess the essential character of a candle”.

They were not shipped with a wick, nor did they have the “ability to provide illumination”, therefore US Customs could not assume the wax was an unassembled candle.

But modifications aren’t always successful.

For example, one company reprimanded in the 1990s had been importing what it claimed were South African feather dusters.

While they looked like feather dusters, an investigation found the products were later manufactured into feather boas and other items of clothing.

US Customs noted the “flimsy construction” of the feathers, which were stuck “one on top of the other”, contrary to the “normal feather duster configuration”. This was seen as an example of “disguise or artifice”.

Back at Ford, the company tells the BBC that it is open about how it transforms its Transit Connects from passenger vehicles to cargo vans.

But US Customs claims the company is deliberately disguising the true purpose of the vehicles, citing that the rear seat frames are unpainted, the seats don’t have headrests and that the covers are made of cheap fabric.

As a result, in 2013, US Customs forced Ford to start paying a 25% tariff on all Transit Connect imports, instead of the previous 2.5%.

Ford immediately challenged this decision at the US Court of International Trade, which ruled in its favor.

US Customs is currently appealing against that decision. In a recent regulatory filing, Ford said: “If we prevail on appeal, we will receive a refund of the contested amounts paid, plus interest.”

Lawrence Friedman, a partner at Barnes, Richardson & Colburn in Chicago, says that new tariffs on Chinese imports could spark a fresh wave of tariff engineering.

He uses the example of a football or soccer goal frame. “It’s essentially aluminum tubes held together by a net and some fixings.”

“If I’m an importer of aluminium tubes, those tubes are now subject to duties.

“But if I put them in a box with a soccer net and some cheap connectors, instead of bringing them in as aluminum, I can bring them in as sporting goods, which are currently not subject to extra tariffs.”

However, Deborah Stern cautions that some items are very difficult indeed to tariff engineer.

“Hats are on the latest US tariff list, and you can’t fashion a hat not to be a hat,” she says.

“Many chemicals are listed on the tariff list too, and if you need a raw material you can’t mess with a chemical too much.

“So while tariff engineering will work with some products in some industries, it’s definitely not for every product in every industry.”

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What jumps out at you when you read the SmartDrive annual survey on speeding is that going too fast is just one of many unsafe behaviors engaged in by the truck driver.

The results of the survey, released in recent weeks, shows a tremendous propensity of speeding drivers to take many other unsafe actions. Looking over the data, it’s hard to know where to begin. Here’s a few:

• A truck driver engaging in what SmartDrive calls “excessive speed,” or more than 10 mph over the speed limit, is also 266% more likely than all other drivers to talk on a handheld mobile phone while driving. The driver is also 241% more likely to text on that phone, and more than 200% more likely to be consuming beverages, food or engaging in “grooming/personal hygiene” while driving.

• Paperwork can be difficult enough to do while sitting at a desk. But drivers who excessively speed are 171% more likely to engage in it while driving.

• The most basic statistics is that the drivers in the category of “top speeders” are 69% more likely to be involved in a collision. The moderate speeders that are in excess of the limit but no more than 10 mph over it are 45% more likely to be in that collision.

• In what might be the most sobering statistic, the drivers speeding in excess of 10 mph over the speed limit are also 272% more likely than other drivers to have both hands off the steering wheel. Not one hand; both.

The methodology to identify those drivers is precise. The category of top speeders is calculated by ranking what Smart Drive calls “speeding rate.” The rate is calculated by taking a driver’s speeding score–which is produced using four separate “speeding observations measured through video events”–divided by the number of miles driven.

The four tests in the speeding score are one, whether the driver exceeded maximum fleet speed, which is when the driver tops the company’s speed limit for three consecutive seconds; two, was the driver guilty of moderate speeding, where the posted limit was exceeded by 1 to 10 mph for three consecutive seconds; three, was the driver guilty of excessive speeding, which is the three-second test for speeds 11 or more mph above the speed limit; and finally, extreme speeding, where 85 mph is breached for 10 seconds.

Slaven Sljivar, SmartDrive’s vice president of analytics, said for the purposes of this study’s conclusions, the performance against an individual fleet’s limit was not included. That’s the concern of the individual companies and is provided to SmartDrive’s clients, but it isn’t part of the broader study. The study that was released was intended to give a wider overview of the speeding issue for trucks, without individual company standards, as well as the behaviors that sometimes go along with it.

Speeding data is available through ELDs and telematics systems. But what SmartDrive is doing with its findings is using video to match it up to the speeding data, Sljivar said. Telematics data can show that a truck went 15 miles per hour above the speed limit. But as Sljivar noted, it doesn’t also show that the truck drifted across a median line while the speeding was going on (and the data shows that the top speeders do that 54% more than other drivers).

While SmartDrive came out with this study recently, it is based on data that is being provided to its clients consistently. “The clients then have the ability to get this information to analyze and use to their benefit,” Sljivar said.

SmartDrive cited data from the National Safety Council Driver Safety poll of early 2017 to show that changing attitudes toward speeding might be a challenge. In the survey, 83% of drivers said they believe speeding is a safety concern, but still, 64% said they are “comfortable speeding.”

The case for fixing this is not just one of safety. It comes down to economics also. Although some of the costs cited would have been borne by victims of bad driving, rather than the perpetrators of it, a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study from several years ago put the cost to employers of speeding-related expenses as $8.4 billion. That is not just from driver injuries, but it is a cumulative number throughout the economy. Right after that was distracted driving at $6 billion in losses.

The SmartDrive study has other economic gains from slowing it down that don’t necessarily involve bodily harm. Citing data from the NAFA Fleet Management Association, SmartDrive cited the wear-and-tear on vehicles as being magnified by excessive speed. “Gears, bearings, clutches, suspension and drive trains all wear much faster at higher speeds,” the SmartDrive report said. “Increasing speed from 50 mph to 60 mph increases maintenance costs by 38%. Increasing the speed to 70 mph increases the cost by 80%.

Finally, the miles per gallon performance for speeding drivers is 2.7% less than all other drivers, according to the SmartDrive survey. With fuel prices having been on the rise, the impact of that is magnified.

This study was the first conducted by SmartDrive on the issue of speeding, but it has done similar surveys on issues such as distracted driving.

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There are similarities between the two, the largest being that they are both under the direction of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA). The CVSA is an alliance of several North American regulatory agencies, including the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators, Transport Canada, and the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation (Mexico).

But there are also significant differences between Road check 2018 and Safe Driver Week. For example, Roadcheck was targeted at trucks and buses, with enforcement of the ELD mandate a key part of this year’s initiative. Operation Safe Driver Week is a broader-based initiative, with trucks and cars both in its scope, but with the interaction between the two as the central focus. After all, it is the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance.

Jill Schultz, the editor for transportation safety at the safety-focused firm of J.J. Keller, said last year’s Safe Driver Week took place in October. It racked up approximately 8,000 citations for commercial vehicles, and 12,000 for passenger vehicles, according to Schultz.

“The CVSA does this at least one week per year,” Schultz said. “What they are looking at is education and enforcement for safe driving behind the wheel for everyone, not just trucks and buses.  It’s a focused effort, and they’re looking for things like moving violations and speeding, and making sure people aren’t using mobile devices while driving.”

“The primary difference is that this is about driving behaviors,” Scott Hernandez, CVSA Director of Crash Standards and Analysis Scott Hernandez, said in an interview with FreightWaves.  And much of the focus will be on the behaviors that can create safety issues in the interaction between commercial vehicles and passenger cars.

But law enforcement is on the road every day. What’s happening here that’s different? As Hernandez said, no matter what your line of work is, “everyone gets busy in everyday life.” So policing behaviors that can often lead to incidents between trucks and cars may not always be the focus of state police officers who are doing a wide range of other activities.

“There are agencies in the country that are working toward this effort, and have assigned people specifically for this,” Hernandez said. “They are not necessarily doing it every other day of the year.”

With Operation Safe Driver Week focused on driver behaviors, it’s imperative that fleets look at programs that change driver behavior throughout the year so drivers are not impacted during this week. One of the most effective programs is video-based safety, like that offered by Smart Drive.

According to AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, video-based onboard safety monitoring systems can prevent as many as 63,000 crashes, 17,733 injuries and 293 deaths each year. As noted by Cypress Truck Lines (“We’ve seen results where we’ve been able to improve driver behavior.”) and Golden State Foods (“It’s a tool that can make drivers great. And great drivers even better.”) and hundreds of other fleets, video-based safety changes driver behavior so fleet managers can relax during Operation Safe Driver Week, and every other week of the year.

There is no firm list of things that states are supposed to do during Safe Driver Week. Hernandez said some states “could dive a little deeper into this.” Individually, state authorities could choose particular corridors that are accident-prone and look to police the behaviors that appear to be causing higher than normal numbers.

Hernandez stressed that whatever efforts are ongoing are not strictly targeted at commercial vehicles. “Some incidents are more often caused by passenger vehicles, so whatever occurs out there on given days is what the officers will enforce,” Hernandez said.

When it’s over, Hernandez said that data from around the country and other parts of North America will be gathered and compared to prior years, “and we’ll see what the trends are.” It will be reviewed at CVSA’s annual meeting in Kansas City in September. 

Operation Safe Driver doesn’t just involve one week. It also has two focused educational programs. Teens and Trucks is aimed at trying to ensure teenage drivers understand what they’re up against when they’re driving in the vicinity of a truck, like its blind spots and how long it takes a truck to stop. A second, Defeat Distracted Driving, aims to educate on truck drivers and that issue.  

The CVSA is not done in 2018 with its “weeks.” Brake Safety Week is coming up in September.

Both Schultz and Hernandez said that unlike Road check week, when there are stories of independent owner operators staying home to avoid the enforcement activities, Safe Driver Week has not had that reputation.

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