Company safety priority is a lifeline for drowsy drivers. ‘Safe work, safe home’ is the motto of Hilton Haulage, the nationwide transport business that places driver wellbeing firmly in the front seat.

A three-month trial of Guardian by Seeing Machines cameras in six of its truck and trailer combinations identified instances of driver fatigue, leading the company to implement the technology across their entire fleet of over 200 vehicles.

In an AutoSense podcast hosted by Greg Murphy, Hilton Haulage GM Safety, Quality and Compliance Tom Bryant, says Guardian cameras are now a non-negotiable in all of their trucks, much like airbags and seatbelts.

“We initiated an initial three month trial not because we thought we had a fatigue issue, but because safety is one of our core values and the technology was out there,” Mr Bryant says. “We hadn’t had an event but what we identified from the cameras was that people were experiencing microsleeps.”

Guardian By Seeing Machines are in-cab cameras that use AI to track driver eye movements and identify driver fatigue and distraction. Proven to reduce fatigue-related events by up to 90 percent, if a driver falls asleep or has a microsleep, their seat will shake and an in-cab alarm will sound to wake them up. 

“We had some guys who were clearly fatigued, having microsleeps driving down the road, which was a real eye opener for us.”

The results prompted Hilton Haulage to expand the six unit trial to 22 units across the fleet.

“From metro trucks to milk tankers, we put a Guardian camera in every single type of unit we had and saw pretty much what we had seen in the first round.  We saw fatigue was right across the operation – it didn’t matter what you were driving, it didn’t matter whether you were a tanker driver that gets out and collects milk four times each run and goes back to the factory, or whether you were sitting in a truck and going all the way to Auckland.

“What was also surprising was that our drivers weren’t experiencing microsleeps at a time we would intuitively think. The fatigue wasn’t greatest at the end of the working week or shift; it was actually on a driver’s ‘Monday morning’, in the first three-ish hours of their first day back at work. It was almost a spike.”

It was hard-hitting footage, not only for management but also for the drivers themselves.

“Drivers were shocked to see the footage. It was quite confronting to people who are professionals, people who take pride in their ability to do their job. We also had a couple of guys with sleep apnoea – seeing a video of themselves was a spur for them to get to the doctor to see what was going on.”

The data provided by the Guardian By Seeing Machines has been game changing for Hilton Haulage.

“That trial was a spur for us to say, we saw it in six, we’ve seen it in 22, so logically fatigue is everywhere in our organisation – and logically it’s in everybody’s trucking organisations. So then we did the full roll out.”

Since then the technology has become an indispensable asset for helping Hilton Haulage with fatigue management and normalising fatigue conversations within their teams.

“One of the big things Guardian has done for us is enable the supervisors and managers viewing the videos to have honest conversations with the team. It’s become much more normal to say to someone ‘you’re really tired mate, I’ve just seen a video of you having a microsleep. You need to stop at the next safest place so I can swap you out with another driver and bring you home’. For me, that ability to have those conversations is the win.” 

AutoSense CEO Charles Dawson applauds Hilton Haulage for taking a proactive approach to safety.

“In New Zealand we fall behind the rest of the world in mandating health and safety policy, and we urge all employers to follow Hilton Haulage’s lead and step up and prioritise safe driving policies and technology within their business – the financial and human costs of neglecting it are just too high. Hilton Haulage didn’t wait, they have front footed their safety practises by installing Guardian technology and significantly mitigated the safety risks to their drivers and everyone else sharing the road.” 

For a company whose tagline is ‘Safe work, safe home’, Guardian By Seeing Machines has provided Hilton Haulage with a critical piece of componentry and peace of mind.

“At the end of the day we all want our teams to go home safe,” adds Mr Bryant. “Knowing that there’s a thing that can help you do that, and not doing it? You don’t want to look back and say, ‘if you’d got that vibration unit in your seat that guy would have gone home’.”