eSafety Compendium

4.5.1 Final Report of Heavy Duty VehiclesWorking Groups - Activity report for the year2004, October, 20051. PreambleThis report is the result of the Heavy Duty Vehicles Working Group’s activities over aperiod of almost a year, as part of the EC eSafety project. The Working Group has been apurely voluntary initiative, with no contractual arrangements of any kind. The results of theGroup’s endeavors as presented in this report are now in the public domain, and may bequoted, subject to specification of the source.As Chairman of the Working Group, I want to thank all members for their open,cooperative, and highly effective contributions. It has been a real pleasure to coordinate theinputs from my colleagues in a range of companies and institutions, all of whom are toppeople in their field. In spite of the diverse individual interests involved, the Working Grouphas consistently provided an excellent example of our ability to work together to make adifference in enhancing road safety.The Working Group is most grateful for the European Commission’s initiative that led tothe establishment of the Group, thereby creating a forum that could focus on the specificissues of heavy duty vehicles with a view to improving road safety. We hope that ourrecommendations will produce some tangible results.2. Executive SummaryThe e-Safety Working Group Heavy Duty Vehicles has been set up to review known roadsafety enhancement measures and approaches specific to heavy duty vehicles, to evaluate themeasures according to the accident figures for heavy duty vehicles and to formulaterecommendations for Member States and the EC on enhanced road safety performance.The Working Group realized from the outset that it would be unable to provide acomprehensive view of the issue of “road safety of heavy duty vehicles,” because of the lackof clear information on the accidents that occur and the wide variety of developments andinitiatives throughout the world for improved road safety. To avoid getting bogged down indetail, the Group also consistently restricted its focus to the main points, without trying toprovide a comprehensive coverage of the topic. By adopting this approach, we were able toagree on significant findings within a short time, and to keep costs down to a moderate level.So the group provided a summary of the significant accident types across all sub-categoriesof accidents. These scenarios represent more then 40% of the accidents analyzed in Europe.With a second step the Group evaluated about fifty safety measures regarding thereefficiency to reduce accidents of the significant accident types. The available and the mostefficient measures are reported within this paper.Page 231 of 490