Driving on a highway or a 4-lane road is pretty easy, but when you are on a tight 2-lane road, things can get really intense and dangerous, especially when you are trying to pass trucks that end up blocking your view of the opposing lane. As you know, Samsung doesn’t live only on smartphones and tablets, and back in July they came up with a neat and relatively simple solution to this problem by installing a camera on the front and a huge panel made of 4 TVs on the back of trucks so drivers behind can see what’s in front of the large vehicle and making it a lot safer for them to pass. The test program took place in Argentina, a place where almost one person dies in a traffic accident every hour, and most of them are due to cars trying to pass trucks on the tight roads of the country.
The first program was really brief and served to demonstrate that the technology worked well. We didn’t hear much about the program since then, but on Wednesday, the South Korean company announced that an official pilot program would begin, again in Argentina, so the technology can be deployed to other countries around the world in four months from now. From the material Samsung provides, it looks like the system will operate on Samsung trucks at first, and it is not clear whether it will be installed on regular commercial trucks, although it would be necessary in order to really improve the safety on the roads.
The system is very interesting and the display has even a night mode to help drivers see at night, but other questions should be raised too. Perhaps the most important are how bad weather will impact the visibility and how users would react to the brightness of the screens at night. Of course, Samsung has a team of experienced engineers, technicians and all sorts of qualified professionals to work on these and other questions. The company didn’t specify where the program will expand next, but in four months we should get more news about the Safety Truck.