In a revealing report that bolsters proponents of safety technology, the AAA Foundation found this week that equipping large trucks with advanced safety tech could prevent as many as 63,000 crashes a year.
“There’s no question that truck safety technology saves lives,” David Yang, executive director of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, said. “This new research shows that the benefits of adding many of these technologies to trucks clearly outweigh the cost.”
In 2015 alone, large trucks were found to be involved in more than 400,000 crashes, resulting in more than 4,000 killed and 116,000 injured. As a result, AAA has put forth an official recommendation that all large trucks, new or old, be equipped with technologies such as lane departure warning systems, automatic emergency braking, air disc brakes and video-based onboard safety monitoring systems.
The report was coupled with a survey of consumers, which found that a majority six out of 10 U.S. adults feel less safe in passing commercial trucks than fellow vehicles, largely due to their size, their blind spots, and their potential to swerve and drift. The same survey found that the addition of safety technology would ease such concerns in about 26 percent of U.S. adults.