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This December, the Safety MAN Road Safety Truck will be crossing Cook Strait and heading up to the big smoke! The NZ Road Trucking Association introduced the truck in late 2017. It’s been a wild success with schools and communities in the South Island, as well as with transport companies and their drivers. Teletrac Navman are thrilled to sponsor the truck through the installation of truck tracking technology for driver safety, and this December, proud to continue to sponsor its journey up to Auckland.
The truck will be open to the public at the Truck and Machinery Show in Pukekohe on Sunday 8th December. It will also be stationed at T R Group in Mt Wellington from 4pm – 8pm on Monday 9th December. It’s an open invite for the industry to attend.
The NZ Trucking association team will be running the two education programmes from the safety truck; ‘Share the Road with Big Trucks’ for the public; and ‘Healthy Truck Driver’ for the industry. The Healthy Truck Driver programme takes a deep look at fatigue, which is believed to be a contributing factor in approximately 12% of all motor vehicle crashes. The programme covers seven topics: Fatigue, sleep, alcohol and drugs, mental health, diet, exercise, and training and qualifications. It outlines what fatigue is, the symptoms and most importantly the common causes and areas which will impact drivers’ fatigue levels.
David Boyce, CEO of NZ Road Trucking Association, has been a driving force behind the truck’s success and gave us some insight into how the truck has been received by the wider community.
The key to the truck’s success
“The Safety MAN Road Safety Truck has been well received by both community and the industry.
We’ve had over 31,000 people visit the truck to date. The programmes are designed to be engaging – people can touch, feel and experience, which works much better than just a piece of paper alone. We’ve had great support. The New Zealand Trucking magazine has dedicated a page each month in their magazine about the Safety MAN visits. We have also done some joint events with St Johns for example, where their medical staff gave drivers free blood pressure checks. At one school visit, Steve Murphy Limited brought in a large logging truck and demonstrated stopping distances at 50km/h and 80km/h. That made a huge impact on the students’ understanding of these large vehicles.”
A great response from the wider community
“The truck is also encouraging the next generation to think about the transport industry. We had one 5-year-old in Greymouth show a huge amount of interest, wanting to understand how the truck worked. We got a call from his mother later to say thank you and let us know that her child is talking about getting a Class 5 licence. We had another elderly lady who had been in an accident with a truck-tractor semi. It swung out wide to prepare for a left-hand turn and she went up the inside, but the driver didn’t spot her. She was very grateful to understand how and why the accident happened – and how she could avoid a similar situation in the future.”
We’re proud to be sponsoring the truck in its journey to Auckland. You can learn more about the truck on its website. You can also learn more about Teletrac Navman’s safety technology on our driver safety page.