A New Hampshire firm says it's developed a new onboard computer for large trucks that could have prevented the rollover accident that devastated an Everett neighborhood this month.
Heimer Sverrisson, chief architect of Cadec Global LLC in Manchester, said his company's PowerVue computer will go on sale in the first quarter of 2008 for $2,450, and can be installed in old trucks as well as new ones.
Other rollover protection systems use an array of truck-mounted sensors to measure speed and side-to-side movement. PowerVue, however, uses a stream of data from Global Positioning System satellites to determine whether a truck is traveling too fast to turn safely.
"The main purpose is to detect the driver's behavior and try to avert it before something bad happens," Sverrisson said.
PowerVue and similar systems are designed to help drivers avoid mishaps like the Dec. 5 accident in which a gasoline tanker truck overturned while traveling too fast through the Sweetser traffic circle in Everett. More than 9,000 gallons of gasoline poured from the wrecked truck, then burst into flames. No one was seriously injured, but the fire destroyed two homes and dozens of parked cars.
A spokesman for P.S. Marston Associates Inc., the New Hampshire company that owned the truck involved in the Everett accident, said his company's fleet is not equipped with antirollover technology.
Tanker rollovers happened more than 1,200 times last year in the United States, according to the Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit think tank. That works out to just over three such accidents every day.
Battelle also estimated that about half of all rollovers are caused by excessive speed, so Sverrisson thinks his company's PowerVue system could reduce such accidents by as much as 50 percent.
Antirollover technology for large trucks has been available for years. About 40,000 US trucks are equipped with a system from Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems LLC, of Elyria, Ohio. The Bendix system uses sensors attached to a truck's brakes and steering system, along with other sensors that measure acceleration and side-to-side motion.
"We're kind of reading what the vehicle is doing and what the driver's doing," said Fred Andersky, of Bendix. The data are relayed to a computer that can automatically limit the speed of the truck.
Chevron Products Co. of San Ramon, Calif., has combined the Bendix sensor system with an earlier version of the Cadec onboard computer in 115 of its fuel tanker trucks in the western United States.
"It senses the speed of the vehicle versus the degree of turn," said Al Mosser, Chevron's global fleet operation standards manager. "When it senses that there may be a rollover . . . it immediately puts on the brakes."
The Bendix system has to be built in at the factory and can't be added to older vehicles, but any truck can be retrofitted with the Cadec PowerVue computer. Instead of sensors, the PowerVue computer uses a GPS system to constantly calculate the truck's exact position. Sverrisson said the GPS fix is so exact that the computer can instantly detect the truck's speed and side-to-side acceleration, then use this data to predict whether the vehicle is in danger of rolling over.
"From the position of the truck and its speed and the center of gravity of the truck, I can literally predict a rollover point," said Sverrisson, who has applied for a patent on the technology. "I was amazed myself by the accuracy of this."
Unlike the Bendix system, PowerVue won't automatically slow down the truck. Instead, it will sound an alarm to warn the driver he's going too fast. Then it will relay that data over a cellular data link to the trucking company headquarters. The company can reward drivers who never get an excessive speed warning or get rid of drivers who get too many.
For now, antirollover technology isn't mandatory on US trucks, but it's become standard equipment on new tractor units from several manufacturers, including Mack Trucks Inc., Volvo Group., and Paccar Inc., maker of Peterbilt and Kenworth trucks. And Congress is considering giving tax credits to trucking firms that buy vehicles with rollover protection.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
(Correction: Because of incorrect information supplied by a company spokeswoman, the name of the chief architect at Cadec Global LLC, Heimir Sverrisson, was misspelled in a story in Monday's Business section about technology to prevent truck rollover accidents.)
