Stripping rear-view mirrors from heavy-duty trucks, buses and coaches can reduce collisions with other road users by 40%.
That’s the claim from Gauzy which, after making specialized vehicle mirrors for 60 years, is now focused on replacing one of the oldest driver-assistance systems with camera arrays and multiple in-cab digital displays.
That’s because when road users, especially in urban environments including pedestrians, cyclists, e-bikes/scooters, motorcyclists and even micro-cars, are involved in collisions with 80,000-lb. vehicles, they always come off a very poor second best.
These sort of accidents involve the commercial vehicle’s owners in insurance and legal litigation, often leading to the vehicle’s downtime during the investigation, not to mention the ongoing costs to the company of the driver’s post-traumatic stress in cases involving fatalities.
So, says Gauzy’s CEO Eyal Peso, fitting a camera system to large vehicles makes commercial and ethical sense for owners of commercial fleets operating in congested city centers. He tells WardsAuto: “Replacing the rear-view mirrors with an advance camera system provides the driver with a safer capability with no blind spots whatsoever.
“In London, 3,300 iconic buses drive with no mirrors using our technology and we are on the way to convert 8,000 buses. We are the only company in the U.S. that is approved to remove mirrors from vehicles; not even Tesla is allowed to do that.
“The displays are positioned on the A-pillars so not to interfere with the driver’s view. There are alerts and alarms when the system spots a potential accident.”
He also points to the added advantage for fleet owners of much improved aerodynamics, reducing energy consumption up to 4% across the converted fleet.
While the company is in talks with some vehicle manufacturers to fit the systems as standard or an optional extra for customers, it’s main work is retrofitting the kit to commercial vehicles that can have a usable lifespan of several decades.
Peso explains: “This is coming to OEMs now but we are also retrofitting because a lot of these vehicles have a lifespan of 30 to 40 years. School buses in the U.S. can be up to 75 years old. So, we have local distributors in various countries to retrofit our technology to make these vehicles much safer than they are at the moment.
“The system is not cheap at about €4,000 ($4,418) per bus in Europe. The selling point is to fleets where the drivers will not want to go back to mirrors after they have tried the system.”
Machine learning and artificial intelligence software also allows the system to adjust to changes in the commercial vehicle’s body shape and length during its lifecycle.
Peso says: “One huge advantage we have over other systems is that we have to have a self-learning system. That’s because the trucks will have all sorts of different bodies during their lives and so the system has to use AI to learn the curvature of the vehicle as it changes through the modifications. It also can study the specific driver and modify the specific messages it sends to the driver.”
However, Peso thinks the costs of the current technology mean the system is unlikely to make it down to the private passenger vehicle level anytime soon.
He explains: “We do get asked by passenger car OEMs about this system, but it would be too expensive. To get what you really need to remove mirrors completely, you have to have displays and that is expensive. You need to get to $40 per vehicle to make it work.”
