In addition to protecting your fleet and drivers from accidents, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) also gather quite a bit of data that can be useful to a fleet. Jim Barber, Bendix director of fleet sales and service, NA-West, addressed the topic in a recent talk at the Heavy Duty Repair Forum in September.
“Our systems generate data, our systems store data. The fleet owns the data, Bendix doesn’t own it,” he began.
How is that data accessed? “With a SafetyDirect subscription, the telematics company of the fleet’s choice can take all that data in the event of a crash or actively going down the road and transmit it off the truck. Other than that, the only other way to do this is through a manual process.”
SafetyDirect is Bendix’s video-based driver safety platform, featuring a web portal that provides fleet operators with feedback on their fleet and drivers, along with videos of severe events.
According to Bendix, data often cannot be used effectively by the fleet because there is so much of it. The information needs to be translated into information before it becomes useful – which, Bendix notes, is what SafetyDirect does.
Barber went on to speak about the value of ADAS. There has been a 44% reduction in forward collisions and 41% reduction in rear end crashes according to IIHS data as of Sept. 2020. “This,” Barber says, “is a very easy ROI for a fleet.”
He then explained a bit about how Bendix’s system, Wingman Fusion, works. “Simply put, the camera and radar data go into the ECU, and when those two fuse together and agree, that’s when the system goes active, making a decision to alert the driver or possibly take action by applying the foundation brakes.”
He gave the example of a can of soda sitting in the middle of the road — the system will pick up on the metal, but it cannot confirm it is a stationary vehicle and will not apply the brakes.
“If they don’t fuse, the system does not go active,” Barber continued. “With the camera and radar, we can now brake on stationary vehicles because there’s more data in the system.”
