Samsung's ‘Safety Truck’

The great thing about (at least the Swedish) 2+1 roads is that not only do you avoid accidents with oncoming traffic when overtaking, but since you can now put a railing in the middle, you also avoid accidental head-on collisions. Which is one of the surest ways to die in a car.

I'm not sure if it's pragmatic from an economic perspective, but it is from an engineering one.

http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.safestates.org/resource/resmgr/...

http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/trans/roadsafe/unda/Swede...

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/11/the-swedish-approach-...

> Very rarely!

It's much more common in rural areas, especially when the road is the one you commute on.

Though you don't tend to see giant Samsung branded big-rigs delivering hundreds of TVs to Mayberry, so maybe it's moot in this case.

Sir, are you engaging in nerd sniping here?

You'd see what's in front of the first truck, except n times shakier and blurrier, for n trucks.

I almost feel like Art Lebedev is a notorious vapourware design studio though! Not sure if they ever proposed actually implementing the truck idea?

I remember they announced their keyboard with OLED screens on each key, and they didn't make a product until a few years after promised. Not vapourware I guess given that it did EVENTUALLY show up. But it did win Wired 2006's Vapourware Award according to wikipedia.

Well, Mercedes and BMW cars can be bought with "nightvision" cameras where the car shows you a view from its IR camera on the dashboard, so in theory you could spot animals or people much easier while driving on unlit country roads. Someone could ask the same question - what if there is a 3 second lag on the video, or if the camera malfunctions and doesn't show you a person when in fact there is a person there?

Well, the answer is the same as with everything else in cars - don't treat any of those systems as absolutes. Just because new cars have automatic breaking doesn't mean I can just approach parked cars at full speed hoping that my car will break for me. It's meant to help, not replace human judgement.

The left turn signal? Interesting... In a few countries that I spent time in in West Aftica, I believe the practice was left turn signal = do not pass, right turn signal = safe to pass.

I've only been in the Tamaulipas state, but driving there, people would drive on the shoulder leaving the center of the road open so you could pass that way. A two lane road often turned into a 4 lane road with some butthole puckering.

Because you think that every person overtaking is an asshole? That's very....close minded? Especially since in some places you have a 60mph limit on single-lane roads,but trucks are limited to 40mph on the same roads, causing a huge queue behind them. And it's not like the screens are replacing your judgement - they merely help. Would you argue that rearview mirrors help assholes because you have to make less effort to look behind you and therefore will be likely more careless when reversing than someone who doesn't have them?

Running wires along the truck might have been more hassle?

I'd guess because it's aimed as a generic attach-to-any-truck setup, where people other than Samsung may not want to run cables through their truck. Also, the cab and the trailer will often be detached and changed; an extra set of cables will probably be a bit annoying.

Plus "wireless" makes a press release sound cool...

Why is it better to have the video inside your own car?

Isn't the point of this is to try to remove a real life visual obstacle from the real life view seen with your real life eyes?

If the camera positions and angles are done right, getting distracted by this may not be such a big deal because you are being “distracted” by what is on the road in front of you, which is good!

it will encourage people and won't increase much safety. on a straight road yes. on a road with lot of turns even a truck won't be abble to see a car coming before the back driver engage

That truck will be emitting white light at the back in some situations which is not permitted by law in many places.

The first issue is kind of unrealistic. It's the kind of issue you can always raise when something changes on the road. From the very start you could've said, "oh cars can be a unsafe because a joker could crash into the side of your car and push you out". Generally people don't do that kind of stuff, especially when the safety of their own vehicle and person is at stake. On the road, you are already putting a lot of trust in your fellow man.

The second issue is real, but I can tell you from experience that it's the kind of things engineers working on automobile parts obsess about. And there are strict standards for these kinds of things. Besides, if you see a frozen image, you know something is wrong. And getting old video is impossible.

"Joker plasters flatscreen of sufficient size on the back of his truck."

Oh, yeah, because someone will buy a truck and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on it and then 4 or 5 thousands more on screens in order to make "jokes".

Jokes that could kill someone and put her in jail, destroy all her wealth, and possible harm her-kill her as a result of an accident.

"System malfunctions and shows old image rather than present image."

Oh, man, some people are really just too frontal lobe- "inventing scenarios that will never happen" and then worry too much.

My company does military, aerospacial life critical stuff. You make it sound like making a screen shut down when something is wrong is magic or the hardest thing in the universe(because nobody else before faced the problem of detecting wrong things automatically...).

The probability that technology fails in uncontrollable ways could be done way less(1/100 or less) than the human failing rate(e.g heart attack on the driver, or he being slept on the wheel because he could not sleep for any reason), or the probability of the driver behind the truck making a mistake(enormously high, 0.1 or so, most of those are harmless "warnings") because he could not see what is in front.

"I'd never ever want to rely on what a medium under someone else's control displays when I want to overtake a vehicle"

Have you never used traffic lights? After all , a "joker" public servant could program two green lights on a cross on those(external control) displays as a "joke". Or they could malfunction and make people die...

Traffic lights are nothing more that green LED lights controlled by PLCs. Someone could open the PLC box, program them badly and create car or rail accidents. Better not use traffic lights at all, or go outside, after all, a meteorite could strike us and kill us.

I have been in craters created by them(meteorites), it is serious.

The first one isn't an issue. What you'd find is the so called joker will be found liable, both criminally and on civil terms if it causes an accident. I'm sure it would happen eventually, and that it would be an extraordinarily rare occurrence, for the same reason people don't regularly go around telling blind people to step out into traffic.

Why would they be found criminally guilty? Intent to cause harm will bury you. There's no other reason to put the false empty road indicator up, other than to cause someone to make a mistake. There'd be next to no debate on this.

Definite issues:

- Durability. Best practice with high-value freight is to back the trailer against an object so you cannot open the doors. Good luck backing those monitors against something solid. Crunch.

- Weight. Trucking companies do things like switch to 'super singles' (a double-wide tire in place of tandems) to save a few pounds. They wouldn't be likely to embrace hanging 4 monitors plus whatever extra gear is needed to power & protect them.

- Compatibility. Trailers currently have standardized connectors for air, power, and signaling (turn signals + ABS + GPS if trailer so equipped). This would need a non-standard connector or at least a secondary one for video.

- Visibility. Nice squeaky clean trucks in the video. What happens a few hours down the road, or in snow when the front grille and trailer rear end are covered in spray, sand, and/or ice?

- Anti-theft. I've picked up trailers in so-called 'highly secure' yards with 24/7 guards and CCTV, and the trailers were missing basic things like brake lights, tires, even the little rubber seals on the air brake connectors that cost pennies to replace. How long to these monitors remain on your trailer when you park in say West Memphis or Baltimore and go inside to eat and shower.

It's an interesting idea and I commend the engineers for producing a partial solution, even if highly impractical for real-world use. Needs much more work though.

Also, watching that demo video the first thing that jumped out at me was how incredibly close the cars were when they cut back in front of the trucks. They filled the displays in the rear, I'd say they were about 1.5 - 2 line markers distant at speed. Incredibly dangerous for the cars, hope no one ever does that in normal driving. If you are that close to the nose of a truck and need to brake, you are getting squashed and there's nothing the trucker can do to help you. They'll be lucky to see you, and definitely won't be able to see your taillights yet. You also just annoyed them by triggering the safety cutout on their cruise control which they'll have to reset each time. This is logged and after too many of these they get called in to talk to a safety manager about their 'tailgating problem'.