PERSONAL VIEW |
OPTIONAL EXTRAS |
 Saul Jeavons |
How much effort does your organisation put into making sure that your staff have safe vehicles to drive?
More and more organisations are – quite rightly – putting great effort into making sure that the vehicles their staff have available to drive for work are well equipped with the likes of ABS and Electronic Stability Control, to prevent them having a collision, and with multiple airbags, side impact protection, and good scores from the European New Car Assessment Programme to protect them from injury in the event of a collision. The best organisations will also look at pedestrian Euro NCAP ratings, and prohibit the fitting of bull bars to avoid causing additional harm to pedestrians.
Vehicle manufacturers spend many millions of pounds attempting to make the inside of the vehicle as occupant friendly as possible, with the bio-mechanics of occupants in a crash a critical consideration in everything they do.
 Occupants are likely to hit parts of their body on a mobile phone cradle positioned in this way |
So why is it, that after all that effort from the manufacturer, and all that effort from your organisation when you procure a vehicle, businesses insist on attempting to undermine the safety that all that effort has delivered?
I’m referring to additional equipment – mobile phone hands-free kits, satellite navigation systems, mobile data terminals and even fire extinguishers. Many organisations fit such equipment, or allow its use, without putting enough thought to what effect it will have on occupant safety.
Leaving aside the issue of whether satellite navigation systems can be a distraction, and if so whether they are more or less distracting than reading a map or being lost, there are the issues of where the system is positioned (we have all seen them, suckered on to the windscreen in the driver’s line of sight) and what effect it might have in the event of a crash.
Can you honestly say that you know how that fixing will react when the airbag goes off? Or the vehicle spins violently through 180 degrees? And with more and more airbags fitted to every area of the vehicle, the zones where additional equipment can be fitted without interfering with airbag deployment are becoming few and far between – with items such as fire extinguishers bolted into passenger footwells hopefully becoming a thing of the past.
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| “Why do businesses insist on attempting to undermine the safety that all the manufacturer's effort has delivered?” |
The placement of many mobile data terminals, as well as causing driver distraction, are likely to prove an injury hazard in the event of a crash, although there is insufficient research into this problematic area. If allowing mobile phone use within the organisation – not advisable given the wealth of research data showing the increased physical risk, as well as the deterioration in decision-making on experimental conversational tasks – how safe is the hands-free kit you have fitted? Are occupants likely to hit any part of their body on the cradle and its brackets?
Further complications arise when using other equipment such as in-vehicle laptop cradles in vans. In one recent case, the company procured a cradle, which had been crash tested by the manufacturer in a frontal crash and shown itself to be well secured. Unfortunately the driver had a side impact crash, pushing him into the side of the cradle resulting in some horrific injuries. This possibility and its implications had not been fully considered by either the company or the manufacturer of the cradle.
 What effect will the positioning of satellite navigation systems have in the event of a crash? |
More work needs to be done in investigating the scale of these problems, but companies should ask themselves the following questions:
- Is the additional equipment really necessary?
- Is there a safer option (such as procuring vehicles
with in-built screens for “sat nav” etc)?
- How good is the user interface of the chosen option
(to keep distraction to a minimum)?
- What effect might the chosen option have on occupants in the event of different crash configurations?
Once these options have been considered, the best advice is to proceed carefully, treat manufacturers’ claims with caution and, if in doubt, seek expert advice.
For further information, contact Saul Jeavons at: E-mail: saul.jeavons@transafenetwork.com
 Zones where equipment can be fitted without interfering with airbag deployment are few and far between |
