A large-scale safety research project is now being rolled out in collaboration with DHL Tradeteam in the UK and Dutch haulage firm Nijhof-Wassink. The aim is to study driver behaviour in various traffic situations and to examine how this behaviour interfaces with the truck’s on-board safety systems.

EuroFOT (European Field Operating Test) is an EU project that brings together 28 European companies and organisations. The aim of the project is to gather daily information on how truck drivers behave in various traffic situations and to study how they are assisted by the truck’s on-board safety systems. This will be done by filming the drivers. A total of 30 Volvo trucks will be driven in regular operation by the two haulage firms over a period of one year. Five cameras in each truck will register everything that takes place in and around the vehicle.

“This project enables us to register in detail potentially dangerous situations. It also allows us to evaluate the benefits of our new accident prevention safety systems and build up a substantial bank of know-how for the development of new systems,” says Carl Johan Almqvist, traffic and product safety director at Volvo Trucks.

The 30 camera-equipped Volvo trucks will operate for a year for a total of 70,000 hours, generating 70 million megabytes of data and will all be equipped with Volvo Trucks’ active safety systems, such as Adaptive Cruise Control.

“New systems such as adaptive cruise control and the monitoring of blind spots considerably boost safety levels for drivers, other road users, the truck and its cargo,” says Carl Johan Almqvist. “The information from euroFOT will give us a new opportunity to demonstrate this.”

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