Iteris Inc and Prime Inc, a refrigerated, flatbed, and tanker truck fleet based in Springfield MO, announced that after carefully tracking the effectiveness of Iteris' AutoVue Lane Departure Warning (LDW) system over the past four years, Prime has reduced rollover and run-off-road accidents by more than 62%.
Prime now has more than 4,000 trucks equipped with the Iteris LDW and has been tracking the miles of both the trucks equipped and not equipped since January 2006. Over that time, the trucks that were equipped with Iteris' LDW systems accumulated 761 million miles, while the non-equipped trucks accumulated 902 million miles. Performance was tracked based on a calculation of the number of accidents per million miles. The per-million-mile rate for run-off-road and roll-over accidents was 62% less on the trucks equipped with Iteris' LDW system. Prime estimates this computes to 84 fewer accidents. Using the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's $91,000 average estimated cost per large truck accident, this could have resulted in a savings of approximately $7.6 million.
“The investment Prime has made to install Iteris' Lane Departure Warning systems in our fleet of trucks has really paid off,” said Robert Low, founder and president of Prime. “There has been a significant reduction in run-off-road and roll-over accidents in the trucks that are equipped with Iteris' AutoVue LDW system.”
Iteris' AutoVue LDW system is a small, integrated unit consisting of a camera, onboard computer, and image processing algorithms. The system's camera tracks visible lane markings and its algorithms detect when a vehicle drifts toward an unintended lane change. If this occurs, the system automatically emits a distinctive rumble strip or other audible warning, alerting the driver to make a correction.
Research conducted by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) revealed that 58% of total automotive-based fatalities were related to lane departures in 2006. The organization estimates that a lane departure crash occurs every 21 minutes in the United States.
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