In the past few years, there’s been a sea-change in the area of video safety and telematics solutions for delivery fleets. For one thing, they’re starting to become standard on many OEMs’ equipment offerings.
“It’s getting to the point now where there are fewer and fewer folks that don’t have a system,” says Rudy Nemeth, vice president of sales at Velocitor Solutions, maker of the V-Track system.
More importantly, though, drivers’ overall attitudes toward on-board cameras have evolved.
“I think we’re starting to see drivers actually want it because they see the benefits when they used to see the drawbacks because they thought they were being watched,” said Jim Becker, V-Track product manager at Velocitor.
Drivers actually are being rewarded for good driving behavior and aren’t being blamed for accidents that they didn’t cause because the proof has been recorded.
The V-Track system is a complete fleet management platform whose camera system uses vision-based video analytic technology to capture road hazards and unsafe driving behaviors. Drivers will get an audiovisual notification alerting them in real-time to those dangers or behaviors while the system simultaneously uploads event recordings to the cloud.
Ultimately, it’s designed to improve driver performance, especially when they’re dealing with so many potential distractions while operating their vehicle. “The delivery folks are getting constantly pinged throughout the day with distractions, so anything that the technology can do to help them is a benefit as well,” Becker says.
They could be juggling calls from the warehouse or from customers or dealing with family issues and neglect some basic safety measures. If the system detects that they’re holding their phone, it’ll tell them to put it down, for instance.
Another significant player in the space, Lytx, announced in October a collaboration with Daimler Truck North America, integrating Lytx’s video telematics and camera solution into select Freightliner and Western Star truck models. Lytx DriveCam will be installed in the vehicles during the production of those models, including the Freightliner Cascadia line.
Lytx also unveiled the system’s new Parked-Highway/Ramp feature, which addresses the safety challenge associated with having to pull a vehicle over onto the shoulder or off ramp. The Lytx DriveCam event recorder identifies a stopped vehicle — for 10 minutes or more — and assesses if it is located on the shoulder or off-ramp of a highway where other vehicles might be passing by. When such an event occurs, the fleet manager is notified so that they can quickly intervene by sending nearby safe parking locations via GPS to the driver.
In other recent supplier news, Netradyne, developer of the Driver-I vision-based safety camera platform, announced a collaboration with connected vehicle system Platform Science. The Driver-I system can assess speed, traffic sign compliance, following distance, aggressive or distracted driving and more, notifying drivers of risky driving behavior by issuing a corrective alert in real-time.
Another key supplier in this realm, Stoneridge, offers its MirrorEye Camera Monitor System (CMS). MirrorEye replaces a truck’s mirrors with integrated external digital cameras and digital monitors inside the cab. MirrorEye offers three views, including wide angle, narrow angle and passenger-side “look-down cameras, expanding the driver’s field of view and helping eliminate blind spots.
A recent report provided by Straits Research found that the global dashboard camera market, currently valued at more than $3.6 billion, is expected to realize a compound annual growth rate of 13%, reaching nearly $11 billion by 2030.
