Yes they could. But what do i know, what with me only being a trained diesel technician.

Clearly a t-shirt salesman would know more about this than someone who went to school to learn truck brake systems.

Bigger rotors(oh wait, most trucks use drum brakes, and pretty much all trailers do- cutting edge stuff!!!), improved brake pads , improved ABS systems and better suspension loading can all vastly improve braking performance. Not to mention reducing the weight of the rig and the trailers themselves.

Put drum brakes on a miata all the way around with thin re-tread tires and increase the weight of the car, and even a miata won't brake like a miata.

There is a LOT of room for improvment in trucks braking systems. Got that professor t-shirt?

These big trucks are extremely dangerous to be around, and cause a LOT of deaths.

hmmm.. Semi's could be made to stop in similar distances as cars. Tires might cost more. ..also Better (faster) braking control systems on each wheel...

As for trains; bad analogy. Trains (conventional) have steel wheels on steel tracks. Stopping distance is limited by the coefficient of friction between the wheel and the road. Steel on steel sucks.

But back to Trucks. The stopping distance is not the big problem. The big problem is if they do hit something. (ping-pong ball meets paddle)

most truck accident's are single vehicle...
that's because the driver elected the ditch ..rather than idiot you..
yes.. there are idiots in rigs..
but we outnumber them..
ride in a rig for few hrs..then come back..
right now..you have no clue...
what they face each mile..

Rika

Totally irrelevant to the fact that trucks braking performance could be vastly improved if the $ was spent to do so.

Amen to that!

The way to really increase roadway safety is to eliminate variances in speed/performance between vehicles. "Speed kills" is a tired oversimplification relied upon by vapid politicians and brainwashed highway cops. The complete statement is "differences in speed kills". Germany's autobahn is proof positive of this. If the traffic all goes the same speed, it matters very little. When you get some vehicles doing 45 and others doing 95, bad things start to happen.

Proper lane choice is supposed to help this. However, we all know it's rarely adhered to. I frequently see big trucks (not semis, but "work trucks", class C "box trucks" and those stupid-azz dually F450 redneck mobiles towing horse trailers or boats or jet skis or dirt bikes) in the left lane constantly. I see people whipping in/out of lanes. I see the middle lane going faster than either the left or right lane. People pass on the right all the time. It's crazy. The concept of lane selection (and restricting large, slower-moving, hard-to-see-around vehicles to certain ones) is supposed to alleviate this. However, it's not done in practice. I think we all know this. If people actually followed the rule of "slower traffic keep right", things would improve. I'd love to see better enforcement of this rule, different speed limits for each lane (55 right, 65 middle, 75 left for example) and a restriction of SUVs, pickups, trailers, box trucks, work trucks and the like to the right two lanes, or at least excluded from the left lane and carpool lane.

IMHO the standards for a basic license should allow you to operate a vehicle only up to about 4,000#, not the 20,000# that a class "C" currently does. If you need to have a larger, heavier vehicle like a truck for work, a trailer to tow a boat, a moving truck, whatever you go down and take a test for it. And make it a tough test like what commercial operators need to go through.

I know I'm dreaming here because ultimately it all comes down to money. State and local governments make a mint off of encouraging people to drive vehicles that are as big, inefficient and expensive as possible so they just hand out licenses for them like candy. There's little real incentive to increase vehicle safety (ironically the only real pressure comes from the scumbag lobbyists of the insurance industry who are really only concerned about it to limit payouts). Mostly everything these days related to vehicles is COMPLETELY about the money trail. If you follow it, the "logic" of it all starts making perfect sense.

Jeff is right..
Europe..= no trucks on the weekend..
not feasible here..
training..OTR folks get that..
any clown can get a car lis.. and does..
trucks are getting safer every year..
stupid folks do not...
even god Brembo cannot save you..
should Lucy decide to crap in your lane..

Rika

Brembo saves a lot of people that otherwise would not have been saved. I mean if brakes are no big deal why don't we just put 4 wheel drums on everything again? Why bother with ABS?

Sure regs can help, but so can better brakes, better tires, better suspensions, and lighter weight construction.

Am I the only one that can handle the simple skills of "don't be hangin' around them there big rigs on the road"? Don't tail them, don't cut them off, don't park next to them on the freeway, and if you need to pass them, wait until you can completely get by so you're not stuck next to them.

If everyone just followed those simple little rules, no one would get squashed by trucks. You can put the biggest brakes in the world on a truck, but they won't help if the driver cannot see what's around him, or has a car dart 10 feet in front of him.

Edit: I grew up a block from the biggest industrial park in the world. The first rule you learned around there was to give trucks any room they want, period. Being that close to thousands of rigs everyday from a young age made me quite aware of what they can and cannot do, and it's simple to deal with: Don't be in the path of one that is moving.

Better brakes increase the safety margin- that's a simple fact. What's with all the resistance and denial going on here?

11 yrs in the truck biz..
PAZ is correct..
trucks these days..have ABS , black boxes and more..
it's changing...
Lucy on the other hand is texting..

Rika

I bet that if we did a study of all of the big rig accidents on the freeways over the last 15 years, you'd find that most of them involved required braking distances that would simply be unobtainable from trucks. Sure, if a rig can stop now in 200 feet, and the accidents all occurred when the car was 190 feet away, then we should enhance the brakes. I bet most of them occur when the car is 10-15 feet away. I don't care what Brembo Gods you call down, you will not get a truck going 65mph to stop when a car slams the brakes while 15 feet away.

I'm obviously in a betting mood today :D

well you would win Mike,
study did also find that most trucker's will crash alone ..
while oblivious Lucy babbles to Mom about having missed an episode of
'Days in her dumb life '
I drive the P like a rig.. on defense.

Rika

Were highways funded and built to support the personal automobile or commercial interstate trucking?

Pazuzu has it correct. Every single day on the highway I see cars cramming their way into the open buffer the 18whl folks are leaving for themselves. The 18whl driver sits high enough to see upcoming traffic and makes adjustments accordingly. Again it's generally the impatient ahole in the car that squeezes in and forces the 18whl'er to stomp on the brake.

Dedicated heavy vehicle lanes make sense but the average American driver is too stupid to follow the rules.

In no way do I believe that there are no idiot car drivers. It is indeed because of that and other reasons why trucks should be able to brake better.

I don't dispute what you and Rika say, however, there is a LOT of room for improvement in current truck brakes. Not just 10 feet worth either.

+1, i agree with that completely.

Guys you have to take into account that if you want a rig to stop into 200ft you are also going to have to keep the 50k lbs of cargo from coming out of that trailer at 70mph. Airbrakes are very very effective and wear much better than disc brakes and will already exceed the limits of the tires. Physics is a big factor here and if you are going to carry 80k lbs there are some things that just have to happen. Long stops is one of them. So are you willing to pay the extra price for goods that will be required if you make a truck stop in 200ft? I mean there is going to be some big money required to do that and truckers don't work for free. I swear some of you people have no clue.

no beef Snipe..
David's post # 33 is so on the $ ..brakes

Rika

Yes, i would gladly pay 3-4% more for my products if we could greatly increase OTH truck safety.

And it can be done.

PS: Air is just the principle upon which truck brakes work, they don't have to be drum brakes, you can make air disc brakes too. Better tires, as opposed to obsolete re-tread technology tires would also help immensely.

Talk about your long stops...

A crash stop maneuver (from 'full ahead' to 'full reverse') can stop a fully loaded supertanker within approximately three kilometres, which takes about 14 minutes. The turning diameter is almost two kilometres.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1252001550.jpg

:-\

trucks can be made to stop just as well as cars (in a straight line) but it cost money. The math (physics) is pretty simple here. Trucks could sport multi-disk space-shuttle carbon-carbon disks, running on soft sticky tires and they would stop faster than most cars. The thing is, each press of the brake would cost more than the driver makes on a run, Note, that as it is, truckers like to 'Jake brake' (compression brake) to save wear on brakes.