Four special interest groups recently asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to require all new large trucks and buses to be outfitted with automatic braking system.
The groups are:
- Truck Safety Coalition, which includes Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH) Foundation and Parents Against Tired Truckers (P.A.T.T)
- The Center for Auto Safety
- Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety
- And Road Safe America
- Forward Collision Avoidance and Mitigation braking systems (F-CAM) would warn drivers to slow down in heavy traffic and apply automatically the vehicle’s brakes if they don’t.
- Such automatic braking systems could prevent more than half of the 4,000 truck crashes in which lives are lost each year.
“Many hundreds of lives could be saved each year if trucks are equipped with automatic braking systems,” said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety.
In their petition to the NHTSA, the advocacy groups say F-CAM systems are readily available on many makes and models of trucks. However, they say only 100,000 such systems are installed on the estimated 3 million Class 8 trucks on the road.
