Statement of Max Fuller, U.S. Xpress

MR. FULLER: Thank you. I'm excited to be here to talk about truck safety. My company has approximately 4,500 power units running throughout the United States and Canada.

We've been a real innovator in a lot of truck safety in the U.S. market. Probably eight-nine years ago, we had the opportunity to take some trips to Europe and actually see some things that Mercedes-Benz was doing in a lot of their R&D departments, and we, because of that, saw a lot of products that were being used in Europe, but they weren't being used in the U.S. market, and I guess through the education and stuff that we've had, we kept saying, well, why, and we decided that we wouldn't wait on the rest of the U.S. market to move to these technologies.

We're going to bring those technologies to the U.S. We've developed strategic alliances with people like Wabco, which makes a lot of brake systems and a lot of other technologies, companies like Eaton-Bosch and Meritor, Daimler-Benz, and a lot of other companies that are really actively participating in some of the advance technologies that you see in the world market.

Our approach on data recorders is to connect it to what we call active controls. We view data recorders primarily as a passive control, and there's a lot of things that we can do in this industry which we call active controls that can prevent accidents.

Our goal has been to adopt these products, and then to connect the black box recorder to these products so we can see what kind of events occur, and so that we can profile the driver, and the goal is to understand what our drivers are responding to, and what they need to respond to that maybe they're not, and if they're not being proactive on safety, get them off of the highway.

Truck recorders in the U.S. are almost non-existent. This industry has been relatively slow to adopt black box recorders for a lot of reasons, but our goal is to change the equation, what we call the safety equation, and when you look at a truck going down the highway, he has to react to a lot of events, and part of that, we need to give him as much time to react as we possibly can.

We need to reduce his stopping distance as much as we can, and in all cases, the truck should never go over, in our opinion, 70 miles per hour because everything becomes more critical.

What we use, probably 98 percent of our trucks are equipped with a data recorder that is built by the Eaton-Vorad people, and it's really kind of an add-on to an active control. The Eaton-Vorad system gives us approximately three to four seconds proactive notification that there's infringement in front of the truck as well as to the right-hand side of the truck.

I think if you look at where the arrows go, this is where most of the truck accidents are occurring. What the black box recorder does is it will actually record maybe infringements. Maybe the guy's in construction zone. He's maintaining two car lengths or two truck lengths in front of the truck, and two or three cars dash in front of him. As those cars dash in front of him, they're limiting that margin of error that he's got that could create an accident.

What this recorder does is it will tell us probably how that event occurred. So, in trying to reconstruct an accident, we can determine whether maybe it was our driver that didn't maintain that margin of safety or maybe it was an automobile driver that dashed in front of the truck and eliminated that margin of error.

But we think tieing the recorder to an active control or to a variety of active controls is really the goal that we need because we really want to eliminate any possible accident that we can have.

As I said, we're trying to move from that passive mode that most data recorders are in and move it into the active side. Part of what we're trying to pick up is how many times the driver's cycling brakes. Is he doing a hard braking? Is he tail-gating or following too close? Is his steering somewhat erratic? You know, is he losing traction?

There's a lot of things that we can sense through a black box recorder that can give us a profile of that driver, and we can determine whether he meets our company's requirements or not, and if we can't retrain the guy, he no longer has a job at our company.

We can reconstruct accidents, and I think when those accidents occur, it's critical to determine who was at fault, who created the accident, and for us to be able to determine how we need to train drivers and how we need to rotate undesirable drivers out of our company, it's critical that we have a device that will give us the ability to do that.

One device that we do use, and this is the only device that we have, it's a black box recorder, is the Eaton-Vorad system, and it's part of that radar system that senses movement in front of the truck, but also is a continuous loop recorder.

Now, part of the problem with the system as it is today is the amount of storage is relatively minimal. So, if you have an accident, the driver has to push a button to record that event. If the driver fails to push that button, and I think it's within 10 minutes, then the event is not recorded, and therefore we don't have the ability to reconstruct the accident.

We're working with the Vorad people to make changes in that area. Part of the problem we have is trucks, our trucks may stay on the road as much as three weeks at a time. So, it really creates the need for a lot of massive storage capability and data recording.

Another weakness that we have is that Eaton at this point prefers to do the analysis of any accident that we have. So, we have to pull the data recorder off of the truck and ship it to San Diego so they can reconstruct the accident.

What you see on the screen here is an actual screen of an accident that occurred. It wasn't one of my trucks, but it was a truck that Eaton did an analysis on, and if you look at the yellow line in the, I guess, third quadrant, that's actually the truck speed. It shows the driver's going somewhere between 55 and 60 miles per hour. He slows down. If you look at the line in the fourth quadrant at the bottom, the first yellow hash, that shows he applied his brakes, and then as the truck approaches, and what he was approaching was two cars that had collided, that were sitting still, and as he approaches, it shows that the driver applied his brakes.

Now, if you look at the hash mark at the very bottom, you'll notice a red hash mark, and that's a warning device that the Vorad system actually activated. It's an audible device that if the flashing light that the driver had shown an infringement in front of the truck didn't get his attention or if it looks like there is an impending collision that the driver hasn't corrected, then the audible alarm comes on really to get his attention.

What you see here is that he applied the brakes almost right on top of that audible alarm. He slowed the truck down to about 10 miles per hour, and it appears like the truck probably started skidding before the point of impact, but he did slow the truck down to 10 miles per hour, which we think by adding the Eaton-Vorad active control system, giving a proactive warning was a pretty substantial improvement in how drivers will respond, especially in those emergency situations.

In this case, it might have been what slowed that truck down to 10 miles per hour before he actually collided with the two cars that were actually in an accident. But the accident reconstruction is in the early stages in data recording on highway vehicles in the U.S. I know they're used a lot in other parts of the world, but the U.S. has been relatively slow to adopt those, and there's several reasons which we'll discuss here in a minute.

One of the major problems is will black box recorders make the U.S. trucking industry safer? And it's probably a yes and no answer. When I use black box recorders in my company, and I've determined that I've got a driver that doesn't handle the vehicle as we prescribed, he no longer has a job. Now, maybe we retrain him, and if it doesn't take, then we terminate him.

In an industry where turn-over runs approximately a 120 to a 150 percent per year, the problem that you've got is he can leave my company and have two job offers before he gets home. So, does it really solve the problem for the industry? I guess my opinion is it doesn't solve the problem for the industry the way it is today.

I think that long-term, it's the right thing to do. I think it's something that all trucking companies need to embrace, but truthfully it works for the individual company if it's used properly, but probably not for the industry until there's some changes made on how regulations control driver records and how those records are being maintained.

Then we have what we call legal issues, and I can tell you any time a truck is involved in an accident in the U.S., whether he was actually the one that caused it or not, we're in a lawsuit, and the concern that we have in the trucking industry is we don't need another element to give a lot of these litigators just to come at us.

You all may know better than I do, but the feeling is that black box recorder readings probably is not an exact science, and our concern is that some attorney may get it, and what was the right move at the right time in an accident may appear to be the wrong move, and therefore we have some major litigation costs in the process.

Another problem that we've had, and I think this has been somewhat addressed, but there's still a lot of concerns in my industry, and that's equal protection, equal justice.

In several cases in the past, some of the federal regulators have come to the industry, and they've tried to take technologies that we, the trucking industry, have invested in, especially the early adopters, and created a dual standard on how they're going to regulate our company versus companies that don't have that type of technology.

We feel like that if you're going to be an early adopter, there needs to be some type of

protection, especially if you're doing the right thing, and we're putting black box recorders on our trucks. We're putting proactive systems on our trucks to help prevent any type of accident that we can identify.

We are testing a lot of new equipment, we come across country. We make various trips to Europe each year to look at new technologies that they've got to bring into this country. So, we think that we're doing the right things in trying to prevent accidents, and our goal is to prevent accidents, but we do need some protections from some of the state and to a certain extent from some of the people in the legal profession because black box science is probably not exact as far as we can tell.

Part of our goal in U.S. Xpress is to connect up these active controls that we've got hopefully to things like Eaton-Vorad system, so we can determine is the driver driving the truck like we want? If he's not, we want to hook the system into system that's a satellite-based communication system called the Qualcom System, and communicate those infringements, maybe it's following too close, back to our company, and the goal is to get the driver out of the truck right at that point, not two weeks later, and part of the problem that we have with black box recorders is it becomes two weeks later in most events.

What we want is a proactive control that gives us the ability to get the driver out of the truck when conditions appear that he needs to be out of the truck. If we miss that opportunity, he may be a statistic, and that's not our goal.

And lastly, at U.S. Xpress, we think that with the technologies that we're bringing to the U.S. market, along with partnerships with a lot of the manufacturers that we deal with, we can make a difference, and we've made a substantial difference in our own safety program. The Vorad system reduced rear-end collisions by 75 percent, and rear-end collisions is probably those most costly accidents that we have in the trucking industry.

Thank you.