All sorts of technological changes are occurring to commercial vehicles large and small these days—to the point where a variety of them are actually driving themselves, no human hands on the wheel required.
While self-driving trucks (at this point at least) still remain something of a future endeavor, other new technologies enjoy broader usage across the industry, especially in terms of safety: blind spot detection, collision mitigation, automatic emergency braking, and electronic stability control, to name a few.
Indeed, you’ll see more than a few of the new models within these pages come standard with such safety systems, a boon to truck drivers on our ever-more busy and crowded roads.
We can even throw real-time routing into the mix, too—routing systems that combine right-this-second updates on traffic congestion, overlaid with weather data, to give a vital “heads up” to drivers and fleets alike to any number of potentially troublesome operation conditions that might lay ahead.
I put some technologies to use during a seven-day test drive with a fully loaded Metris commercial van covering 945.8 miles across seven Mid-Atlantic states. The experience proved to be an eye-opener—though not as expected.
Nothing proved more valuable than blind spot detection, especially in heavy New York City traffic. The yellow triangles on the corners of the side-view mirrors alerted me to vehicles in my blind spot, affording me a key piece of driver decision-making data, especially when snap lane changes needed to be made with mere seconds to spare.
Access to a true real-time routing system didn’t come with this particular Metris van, but my own smartphone-based one did pretty well by alerting me to traffic delays and providing alternate routes based on those delays. Not a bad combination of technologies to have handy—blind spot detection and GPS routing—especially when driving on so many unfamiliar roads often at night and usually in heavy traffic flow.
And yet …
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, I began to place more trust in those vehicle technologies while driving. If I glanced at the triangles on the bottom corners of the side-view mirrors and noted they weren’t lit up sun-yellow, more often than not, I’d change lanes without further checks. Plugging in different addresses to the GPS became ritualistic, almost second-nature.
Why bother double-checking on a map? It’s been plotted by algorithms, flawlessly compiled by a computer.
Or so I thought.
A few times, a motorcycle caught me off guard. Sometimes the blind spot detection system would spot it; sometimes it wouldn’t. Pedestrians went unnoticed by the system, too, and boy, do folks dart out into busy urban streets oblivious to everything outside of their smartphone screens and the music burbling in their headphones.
Then there are the funky things a GPS can do. For example, when trying to find an office location near the Pentagon, I discovered that GPS points will suddenly be altered—by design for security reasons—so one’s directions suddenly go completely off the deep end.
More than a few times on my journey, the GPS took me to the wrong location. (Was the Chick-fil-A truly hidden somewhere within the abandoned and boarded-up industrial plant I ended up at in New Jersey? I didn’t hang around long enough to find out.)
The GPS also directed me onto the wrong highway from time to time due to inaccurate plot points within its algorithm or via incorrect address numbers punched in by hand (thus allowing human error to once again enter the vehicular picture).
Despite the safety net created by technologies on board today’s vehicles, it still behooves the human behind the wheel to always double-check things and not slack off on basic driver training points, e.g., turn your head to check the blind spots, give those mirrors a second glance, and use those old paper maps to verify GPS is sending you in the right direction.
