The Australian Government should save 148 lives in the coming years by mandating stability control for new trucks and trailers, the Chair of the Australian Trucking Association, Geoff Crouch, said today.
Mr Crouch was releasing the ATA’s response to the Infrastructure Department’s regulatory impact statement (RIS) on mandating stability control for heavy vehicles.
Stability control is a vehicle safety system that monitors the stability and sideways acceleration of a heavy vehicle, and kicks in to brake the vehicle if it detects a rollover starting.
The RIS proposes that stability control should be required for new prime movers weighing more than 12 tonnes and new trailers weighing more than 10 tonnes. The technology would not need to be fitted to new rigid trucks.
The ATA submission recommends that the Government should go much further.
“The Government should lean in on safety and mandate stability control for all new trucks and trailers, including rigid trucks, with only narrow exceptions,” Mr Crouch said.
“The ATA approach would save 148 lives and stop 1,496 serious injuries. It would save 24 more lives and stop 412 more serious injuries than the narrow approach recommended in the RIS.
“Our approach would cost businesses an additional $117 million in total, but this would be spread over many years and over every industry that buys new trucks. In reality, the additional cost would be very small compared to the safety benefits. It’s a cost we are willing to pay.
“The benefits from the ATA’s approach would be more than twice the costs. That’s more than the benefit to cost ratio of requiring electronic stability control for new passenger cars,” he said.
New road train converter dollies would be exempt from the ESC requirement, because of issues with the technology in the rough conditions encountered by road trains in rural and remote areas. Non-standard low loaders would also be exempt.
