Driving a truck, especially in city areas, is a challenging task and blind-spots around the vehicle are one of the factors that make driving a heavy vehicle that little bit more difficult. Pedestrians and cyclists can be lost in those blind-spots, especially to side and front of the vehicle, and despite care being taken by even the best truck driver, accidents can and do happen.
Scania has been designing truck cabs that provide better visibility for the driver for a number of years now and that has just been recognised in a new study by the Loughborough Design School.
The design school at the Loughborough University in the UK looked at blind spot size in the 19 best-selling trucks in the UK and found low entry cabs generally offer better direct vision than standard cabs.
However, the Scania P-series cab was found to share many of the good visibility characteristics of the low entry cabs. The study finding that a cyclist is visible to the driver in immediate proximity to the Scania, when in some other brand cabs, the cyclist is obscured for a distance of 1.5 metres.
While pedestrians standing in front of the Scania truck will be detected in just 20cm, this compares to other low entry cabs where the driver couldn’t detect the pedestrian at all.
