"“For the trucking industry, the risk is magnified: we’re no longer talking about two-tonne vehicles of steel and glass, but up to 40-tonne vehicles that may be carrying hazardous freight. So it becomes even more important that manufacturers get crash-optimization right with trucks, given the risk of much more serious—and high profile—harm,” said Patrick Lin, director of the ethics and emerging sciences group and associate philosophy professor at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis, California.
All of these systems won’t just keep track of what’s going on in the outside world, they will also keep a close eye on activities in the truck as well, said Lin.
“For the trucking industry, I’d expect that privacy issues will be a top concern. Truck drivers are already held to near-superhuman standards to make their trips in a dangerously short amount of time. Add to this the push for telematics by the insurance industry, driver-drowsiness detection and other biometric technologies that monitor humans inside the vehicle and the general appetite for interconnectivity and data collection by the technology industry, and it looks like the perfect storm for Big Brother inside the vehicle. The transportation industry may be affected first, since this would be done in the name of workplace safety.”"
- Date Published:11/05/2014
- Original Publication:Truck News