Work trucks are a necessary investment for companies that need to haul people, equipment, and materials from one place to the next. Because these types of trucks can be a major investment, it’s important that you’re putting in the extra work to properly protect them on and off the road; being proactive helps protect your financial investment of the work truck and keep your employees safe. Fortunately, there’s ample technology out there that makes this possible. Here are three ways technology can be used to make a work truck safer.
1. Protecting Drivers and Loads With an Electric Tarp System
For work trucks that are hauling large loads of materials that could easily fly around and impact the driver or other drivers on the road, you need additional protection to keep all of the material where it’s supposed to be.Electric tarp systems achieve just that by tightening the tarp around the load as needed without the need for human interference. This can make it easier for your workforce to better secure loads that might otherwise fly out while they’re making their way to their destination.
2. Preventing Crashes With Additional Sensors and Cameras
Modern technology has greatly improved road safety, and you can implement many of these features into your work trucks. For example, some of the most common safety features that you can find in modern fleets include rear cameras and blindspot cameras so that truck drivers are always able to see what’s behind them, forward collision warnings that help truckers avoid accidents before they’re able to occur, lane departure monitors to keep them from veering out of their lane, and automatic emergency braking when the need arises, just to name a few.
While these types of features will require an upfront investment, they’re more than worth the extra cost to keep employees, vehicles, and equipment safe when they’re on the road.
3. Embracing Speed Limiters
Making sure that trucks are able to stop in time to prevent accidents is crucial to road safety, but it’s not always possible to control all of the circumstances surrounding these types of incidents. What you can control, however, is the speed that trucks go to improve braking time and reduce the likelihood of a serious crash. Speed limiters can be installed in your work trucks to make sure that drivers are only allowed to reach a maximum speed while they’re on the road. Of course, it’s important to make sure that you’re adhering to the various speed limitations in your state and considering local rules and regulations that affect what speed you’re able to limit drivers to.
Your work trucks and your drivers are important to your company, which means that you want to keep them both safe no matter where their work might take them. If you’re looking for ways to make work trucks safer both in terms of the way that they perform on the road as well as the items that they’re carrying during work hours, consider using the three forms of technology listed above to get started.