How AI Tools Improve Driver Safety

Commercial vehicles are an integral part of the American economy, delivering essential goods to every corner of the United States. Millions of commercial and consumer vehicles occupy the road every day, making everyone stakeholders in keeping the roads safe, whether it’s a construction worker in a work zone, a family on a road trip, or a truck driver making a freight delivery. But the road isn’t the only thing we share – the obligation to drive safely is the responsibility of both commercial and non-commercial drivers.   

As an industry that earns its keep by miles traveled, fleets invest heavily in safety and safety technology to keep drivers safe on the road and avoid crash-related disruptions and vehicle downtime. Though fleets have continued to trend safer, approximately 115,000 large truck accidents resulted in a fatality or injury in 2021, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts report. The cost to society is this: $163 billion in 2019 ($182 billion when adjusted for inflation) as noted by the Advocate for Highway and Auto Safety – 2021 Large Trucks Report. While these numbers are daunting, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to close this gap and reform transportation safety for everyone both on and off the road.

Just five years ago, the transportation industry had less technology at its fingertips. It’s a different story today. In an ongoing effort by the transportation industry to create safe roadways and enforce safe driving practices and behavior, the industry is now equipped with new AI-powered technologies and tools that could drastically reduce the number of accidents, injuries and fatalities, and damaged or stolen freight and data. Here’s how:

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AI powers a wide variety of technology solutions for heavy-duty trucks, including driver-facing cameras and in-cab alerting systems that notify drivers and back-office staff in real-time to prevent unsafe driving behaviors.

AI models can be trained to detect unsafe driving events captured by cameras on a truck, such as following too closely to the next vehicle, cell phone or tablet use while driving or even a driver becoming tired while on the road.

Driver fatigue is a well-known commercial motor vehicle safety problem; studies show that driver fatigue is a major factor in up to as many as 13% of truck crashes, according to Advocate for Highway and Auto Safety. Current AI-powered technologies can detect indicators of driver fatigue and alert drivers that they may need to pull over to rest.

In places that have implemented front-facing cameras, we’ve seen a drastic reduction in crashes. In Brazil, where camera technology has been adopted more than in the U.S., front-facing AI cameras have reduced traffic accidents by 86% and have prevented over 90% of fatal ones. If implemented on a global scale, the number of severe crashes could be reduced dramatically.

Safer routing and data processing

Everyone has seen signs on residential streets advertising a weight limit for heavy-duty trucks – something that routing solutions and navigation applications use for commercial vehicles to provide truck drivers with the best, most truck-appropriate route for their delivery.

With AI, these solutions can process vast amounts of data to also consider real-time traffic data, severe weather conditions, or even road layout to improve safety. As an example, truck rollover was the first harmful event in 4% of all fatal crashes involving large trucks and 2% of non-fatal crashes.

Trimble tools have identified over 4,000 rollover risk locations in the United States, alerting drivers traveling over a certain speed about rollover possibilities depending on the curvature of the road. But the scaled data processing capabilities of AI could even further enrich these risk profiles, overlaying and processing additional data streams like driver tendencies and equipment life to create real-time risk profiles unique to a specific driver and their specific environment.

Another application of these solutions may apply to situations like construction work zones – a notoriously dangerous area for large trucks. In 2021, 33% of work zone fatal crashes and 15% of work zone injury crashes involved at least one large truck, so using AI to process real-time data about upcoming work zones and either alert the driver in advance or re-routing the driver could reduce accidents.

In the future, AI could even connect these construction zones on the road to identify traffic trends, warning drivers to slow down well in advance so they have time to brake earlier, preventing back-of-queue crashes.

Cybersecurity

It’s not just on-the-road safety to be mindful of these days. Cybersecurity attacks on trucking and logistics companies could prevent essential deliveries of critical products like medical supplies, fuel, or livestock feed, not to mention the potential for hackers gaining access to a heavy-duty vehicle.

Since today’s economy is reliant on carriers to move goods, the transportation and logistics industry has become a prime target for hackers and bad actors looking to make a quick buck. According to Security Magazine, the transportation industry is one of the most high-value targets for ransomware attacks due to the industry’s increasing digitalization and use of hardware devices. The average cost of a data breach in the United States was $9.44 million in 2022, according to IBM’s annual Cost of a Data Breach report, and breaches are only getting more costly as hackers become increasingly agile. 

Although hackers are using AI to increase the speed, sophistication and scale of their attacks, AI tools can also be gamechangers in monitoring and preventing cybersecurity risks by identifying and analyzing patterns globally to detect similar attacks and prevent gaps in protection.

For example, many transportation companies are partnering with Microsoft, which leverages OpenAI to identify threats to its Azure platform. Microsoft monitors 78 trillion threat signals per day–more than any other entity in the world.

In 2023, about 295 automotive-related cyber incidents were reported, with the most common impact being a service or business disruption (experienced by about 42% of companies), followed by a data or privacy breach (reported by about 22% of companies). However, this is likely just the “tip of the iceberg,” according to industry experts.

Looking ahead

Even one fatal accident on the road is one too many, but by leveraging sophisticated tools, technologies and safety programs, the transportation industry has the power to prevent tragic accidents and create a safer, more secure environment.

As AI tools become smarter and more widely adopted, their potential to prevent accidents, protect data and enhance smart routing will continue to grow, making the roads safer for all involved.