Family-owned Canadian LTL carrier East West Express is installing Mobileye Vision Technologies' Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) on both its company-owned and contracted trucks in an effort to not only improve the fleet's safety record, but potentially help lower its insurance costs in the future.
“Truck insurance companies don't give discounts for just installing safety systems — they give you discounts based on a fleet's safety performance,” says Tom DeWaal, co-owner of Calgary, Alberta-based East West. He adds that East West is going to pay for the Mobileye installation on the 30 or so trucks it leases from owner-operators as well as its 22 company-owned vehicles.
Mobileye's ADAS system provides lane departure warning, headway monitoring, and forward collision warning — functions DeWaal believes will allow East West's drivers to focus more of their attention on the road.
“So many factors lead to accidents on the highway,” he says. “Just taking your attention off the road for a second to get your coffee, change the radio station, or find the right gear is all the time it takes for a situation to develop.”
Last year, DeWaal drove one of his company's trucks across Canada, down along the East Coast of the U.S. and back — almost 14,000 miles total — to demonstrate the value of the technology.
“When you talk about having a minimum safe following distance of four to five seconds between vehicles, at highway speeds that's a lot of space and hard to measure with just your eyes,” he says. “Having that technology onboard helped me pay better attention to where I was in the lane and in relation to the traffic around me.”
