|
Did You Know?
|
Fact
“About half of deaths in fixed object crashes in 2004 occurred at night (9 pm-6 am). The highest proportion of fixed object crashes occurred between midnight and 3 am.”
— Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, “Fatality Facts 2004”
Many serious accidents occur at night because the driver could not see the accident cause in time to prevent the collision. Thermal Camera directly addresses this problem, allowing drivers to see farther ahead on nighttime roadways and identify potential problems earlier. The majority of trucking accidents occur in rural areas, where visibility is severely reduced at night.
Humans and other warm blooded animals offer significant thermal contrast to driving backgrounds and are easy to spot with the Thermal Camera. The system allows drivers to see without any additional lighting and provides real-time imaging at any speed.
Fact
“Highway and street construction workers are at risk of fatal and serious nonfatal injury when working in the vicinity of passing motorists, construction vehicles, and equipment. Each year, more than 100 workers are killed and over 20,000 are injured in the highway and street construction industry. Vehicles and equipment operating in and around the work zone are involved in over half of the worker fatalities in this industry.”
— National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Building Safer Highway Work Zones
Heavy machinery accidents can include rollovers, run overs, and falls. Limited visibility on a job site makes it easy for vehicle operators to come too close to a ledge or ditch. The Thermal Camera produces an image in complete darkness and through smoke and haze, allowing operators to clearly see other site workers and to have increased visibility of terrain changes.
Thermal Camera can be used for both forward and rear visibility; and unlike radar technology that simply signals an alert, Thermal Cameras lets operators see most objects in or near the path of the vehicle. A Thermal Camera is specifically designed to withstand the harsh construction/trucking environment, with a hermetically sealed external housing resistant to rocks, sand, salt, and under-hood contaminants. Additionally, the wide operating temperature range allows the Thermal Camera to maintain high performance in severe weather conditions.
|
Fact
“In the last decade, the average large truck involved crash cost $59,153; the cost per crash with injuries averaged $164,730. The average cost of fatal crashes involving a large truck was over $3.2 million per crash. The average annual national cost of large truck crashes in 1997-99 exceeded $19.6 billion. That total included $6.6 billion in productivity losses and $3.4 billion in resource costs.”
— Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, “Revised Costs of Large Truck- and Bus-Involved Crashes”
Crashes are expensive, and often avoidable. With additional reaction time, drivers can make accommodations for pedestrians, animals, road debris, and other vehicles. The Thermal Camera allows drivers to see roadway information 5 times farther away than with most low beam or hi-beam headlights, including hazards on the side of the road that conventional headlights cannot illuminate.
Risk mitigation is an important part of reducing operating costs for commercial vehicles. Using the Thermal Camera as part of a fleet-wide crash prevention strategy can reduce the expense of repairs, productivity losses, and raised insurance rates.
One accident avoided pays for the Thermal Camera six-fold.
Fact
“The best estimate is that more than 1.5 million deer/motor vehicle crashes occur each year on U.S. roads. These collisions result in about 150 occupant deaths and more than $1 billion in vehicle damage.”
— Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Status Report Jan. 2004
Animals are naturally camouflaged as a self defense mechanism, making them very difficult to see until drivers are too close to react.
With thermal imaging, animals are easier to see; Thermal Camera helps drivers to spot animals both at night when the roadways are dark and during the day when they are hidden by natural camouflage.
Because the Thermal Camera sees farther than headlights, it allows drivers to see animals both on and approaching the roadway with enough time to react appropriately.
|
|
Thermal Camera are a revolutionary driver’s vision enhancement system designed to help drivers see farther and have more time to react to road hazards. The Thermal Camera also helps drivers to see road edges better, see approaching curves earlier, to overcome momentary blindness from oncoming headlight glare, and to see through smoke, dust, and light fog.
All of this is possible with a Thermal Camera it’s advanced thermal imaging technology.
|
|
How does thermal imaging improve safety?
With the Thermal Camera technology, the things you want to see – people, animals, and other vehicles – stand out dramatically.
With an in-cab display, drivers are easily able to spot road hazards with more time to react appropriately. The Thermal Camera increases the line of sight five times farther than headlight beams.
Vehicle headlight systems provide between 250 to 450 feet of moderate illumination; at 60 miles per hour this means less than 4 seconds to react to hazards. With Thermal Camera,a driver can have more than 15 seconds
|
to react to hazards, depending on conditions. The increased reaction time can make a life saving difference. On poorly lit roadways, the Thermal Camera can alert drivers to animals near the road that are outside the normally illuminated area of headlights. In residential areas, the Thermal Camera can help spot pets, joggers, bicyclists, and other pedestrians on the road’s periphery.
What is thermal imaging?
With our eyes, we see visible light. With a thermal imager, we can see infrared – a form of light just beyond the visible spectrum. Thermal imagers show subtle differences in temperature; warm objects appear white and cooler objects appear black. TruckerWarez’s thermal imaging cameras are useful for militaries worldwide to navigate at night and in battlefield conditions. Over the last few years, volume production of these systems has allowed FLIR to offer the same high performance cameras designed for military use to the commercial market, and can be found in select 2006 BMW cars.
|
|
|
