August 20199 ONE OF THE OFT-TOUTED PROMISES OF AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES IS THAT THEY HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO ELIMINATE THE 90 PERCENT HUMAN-ERROR-DERIVED PART OF THOSE 1.3 MILLION AFOREMENTIONED TRAFFIC DEATHSinstall Driver Monitoring systems ­ driven by a string of high-profile crashes with mass casualties. Requirements are expected to be extended to trucks as well, and indications are that transporter all around Asia will look to driver monitoring tech to reduce accidents even when not mandated by local policy. In Europe, privacy concerns will remain crucial for adoption of monitoring technology, but biometric solutions can safeguard driver's privacy, as well as video capture solutions that use imaging to alert the driver without sending the video feed to a central location or storing it long-term, except in case of accidents.An even higher tech area is the adoption of external sensor-arrays made up of cameras, radars and sometimes LiDARs (Laser radars) to allow for the vehicle to take certain safety related decisions on its own, otherwise known as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Most notable are the automatic emergency brake (AEB), lane departure warning (LDW) and blind spot warning (BSW) functionalities. But other functions are on the horizon, and the fundamental architecture of ADAS is moving vehicles closer to the autonomous future that so many companies are pledging.One of the oft-touted promises of autonomous vehicles is that they have the potential to eliminate the 90 percent human-error-derived part of those 1.3 million aforementioned traffic deaths. While an admirable ambition and theoretically plausible, that outcome could be far away. Fully autonomous vehicles are not yet able to handle normal operations in complex environments frequented by a mix of road-users. Autonomy will have great efficiency gains in limited use-cases in the short-term, but the long-term future will leave us waiting.While all these exciting high-tech developments are gaining ground vehicle manufacturers are also fine-tuning the basics. Airbags are still far from standard all over the world, neither are vehicles always properly maintained. Simple things like putting on your seatbelt is also not a given in many places. The quest for smarter and more intuitive solutions to old inventions is ongoing.What is clear though is that safety will remain a key driver towards more sustainable transport solutions. And with the global growth of transportation demand and emerging markets' rush to increase their mobility, the peak of the problem might not yet have been reached. This should be an additional boon for manufacturers to double-down their efforts in search of safer products that are affordable and available to all. The most serious types of accidents for modern truck drivers are when their trucks rollover either at high speed on corners or in conjunction with running off the road, or when they drive into the truck in front when a queue suddenly pops upAlexander Mastrovito,
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