Samsung attaches TVs to their big-rig trucks to help promote road safety

Almost every road traveler has been in that situation--stuck behind a lumbering truck on a 2-lane highway with no clue about whether it’s safe to overtake. Instead of inching into oncoming traffic to get a better glimpse of the road ahead, here’s a novel project that Samsung implemented recently.

The South Korean giant’s Argentinian presence--in an effort to highlight the country’s stark driving-related mishap statistics--launched an interesting campaign: They affixed televisions to the back of a big-rig truck that displayed the images of a forward mounted wireless camera showing the road ahead of the truck. Doing so enabled vehicles behind the truck to get a clear, unambiguous view of the overtaking situation, effectively reducing any hesitation for cars that wouldn’t otherwise be able to see oncoming traffic on a narrow road. The system even has a night vision mode for low-light driving.

While the company does not have any plans to deploy this setup on a wider scale, they are working with government and non-government road safety organizations to explore viable methods of furthering the technology. There exists the inherent challenges of cost of deployment, mounted screens being pilfered or vandalized, the video stream tending to be a distraction and the clarity of the image in various weather conditions. It will be interesting, though, to see how far this experiment eventually goes.

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