Almost 80 years after its official opening, the famous Hoover Dam was the setting for the world premiere of the Freightliner Inspiration Truck Tuesday evening. Doing double duty holding back trillion gallons of water and generating electricity for Las Vegas and California, the dam served as the largest projection screen ever in North America.
This projection—at 1.17 million lumens—earned Freightliner the Guinness World Record of highest light output projection ever, the company reported. And, with the Freightliner Inspiration Truck, Daimler introduced the world’s first autonomous truck licensed to drive on public roads at the historic concrete arch-gravity dam in southeastern Nevada.
“The Hoover Dam provides the ideal setting for a debut as significant to the trucking industry as this,” emphasized Dr. Wolfgang Bernhard, Member of the Board of Management of Daimler AG, Daimler Trucks and Buses. “Not only was it built primarily using trucks, but it signifies inspiration like few other structures in the world. To show the significance and opportunities of autonomous driving functions for the global trucking industry we were willing to go ways that people did not dare to think about before.”
To give this historic event a fitting, monumental backdrop, 60 projectors at 26,000 watts each projected the 30-minute presentation that introduced the Inspiration Truck. To finish of the reveal, the truck drove onto the dam.
This unique video screening was projected onto a surface of a little over 420,000 square feet. This is equal to almost nine football fields and over 87 average-size IMAX screens.
