As an impressionable 8-year-old my family was visiting friends, one of whom worked at the Montana Department of Transportation documenting road accidents.
His office was festooned with graphic images of horrendous heavy-duty truck accidents. I’ll save you the vivid details burned into my young brain. I think it explains why so many years later I gravitated to watching the TV series Highway Thru Hell about the recovery teams trying to keep the passes in British Columbia open.
I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the biggest challenges facing the array of new trucking technologies is that the developers really don’t grasp that trucks crash and need to be repaired.
I applaud the idealistic goals of zero crashes that multiple agencies and technology companies are aiming for, but I live in today. My experience is that vehicles crash. No disrespect to the engineers, the manufacturers, the regulators or the driving community, but reality is that stuff happens. The real world has a lot more challenges in it than perhaps we want to admit.
One of those challenges is that animals can’t read and will wander aimlessly in front of high-speed vehicles on such a regular enough basis that insurance companies have codes for those accidents.
One of the first truck models I worked on got me interested in crash bars — these come in different flavors called variously brush bars, bull bars, deer bars, moose bars, and yes, even roo bars in Australia. The National Library of Medicine published a report stating, “Nationally, animal-motor vehicle crashes account for 4.4% of all types of motor vehicle crashes.”
Vehicle manufacturers have even developed a standardized moose avoidance test protocol (ISO 3888-2) to test steering stability. Variations of the testing include crash dummy moose or kangaroos, depending on where you live. Trucks with massive front guards are seen frequently on roads all over the world, so new technology designers take note: animal crashes happen.
