Camera's are coming to a truck near you or Yours.

Alright guys, I'm going to be the voice of reason here. I drive for a local grocery distributor here in Louisiana, and we have the Smartdrive Cameras. We run daycabs so I have no idea how it would work with a sleeper - however, if you're doing your job correctly the cameras will save your butts. I've had 3 or 4 instances of being summoned in for video review - one for running a stop sign (state trooper waved me through before an oversized load came up), had to hit the brakes a few times for red lights, and I gave someone the finger after cutting me off and having to hard brake. That's just my instances.

As far as what the company sees - it just saved them a $10 million wrongful death lawsuit that one of my coworkers was involved in - car tried to go around our truck in an intersection, truck was turning left, car got wedged under the side of our trailer. Witnesses statements pointed at our driver as the one to blame, however the video showed him in proper position to make the left turn, signal on, progressing through an intersection as he should have done. Immediately after the wreck the first thing he did was to activate the cameras to prove his innocence.

Another instance being that one of our drivers was inside a store signing paperwork and a car backed into our truck hard enough to activate the camera. She stated that the driver hit her when he was leaving and he had no clue what she was talking about - cops rung him up for hit & run, careless operation, etc. Low and behold the camera review comes in a day later and shows her backing into the truck. Saved the drivers career.

Yeah, it can incriminate you too if you're a terrible driver. But after having these systems in my truck for the last two years I don't think I'll go without them again. Not too sure how I'd like it being in my truck being a sleeper, but from everything I've seen I've had no privacy issues in my daycab because it takes an "event" to trigger the camera recordings (hard braking, hard swerving, impact to the vehicle, or triggering it manually via the push button on the camera). I'm not here to pump sunshine, but don't get paranoid about it either. I know a few drivers that swear up and down that their careers were ended by lawsuits from people who were actually at fault but the driver got the blame.

 

Must be tough for you when it comes time to go shopping for food, or clothing, or fuel. I haven't been able to buy fuel for my work truck or personal vehicle without being on camera in at least 10 years.

 

That truck is your home - you live there. How could you even entertain the idea of having a camera in your bedroom controlled by some guy you've never met? I'm sorry, but some of you need to man up and stand up for yourselves.

There is zero chance I'll ever drive for someone with a interior camera. I've heard others say the same thing on this thread. If that attitude would spread, there wouldn't be any risk of it happening.

And yes, I'm aware that we are on camera for a lot of our lives, but not one single camera pointed just at you 24/7.

 

You can call it your home all you like but a CMV is not a legal residence and the laws that apply in your home do not apply there and all the 'maning up' in the world isn't going to change that.

 

You seem inclined to want to take this into the legal realm. That isn't the basis of my point. The carrier owns the equipment, and I don't question their right to put cameras in it.

If drivers refused to work for carriers with interior cameras, cameras wouldn't be an issue.

 

Funny so many against company cameras yet so many cannot wait to post THEIR movies / videos on USELESS TUBE

 

Somewhere up there the argument was made that it costs the carrier too much to stream in live video feeds from all trucks or some trucks or even one truck. What you may not know is that the company can blast out a 5 minute innocuous video to over 15,000 trucks on the Qualcomm simultaneously and it evidently is not costing them too much. I say that because the videos are pretty much a waste of everyone's time. Usually something like "Hello from sunny Phoenix here, probably icy where you are and you are doing the right thing, blah blah blah, be safe by choice not by chance."

So if Swift can send out so many videos cheaply my argument is that in the future they will be able to link the cams to the QC and maybe even one day have video conferencing between headquarters and individual drivers or mass amounts of drivers like those webex seminar things. Don't just lie down and let the steamroller run you over.

 

From a different direction, but that is a point I made earlier.
As you said, if they can afford to send everyone videos several times a month, they can afford to download a few each month from each of us.

Each 3 minute segment of 1080P video creates a ~250 MB file. (A bit less than that actually, while in motion. Sitting still the file is around 147 MB.)
While rather large, I could download 80 of them or more with my 20GB limit that I pay $120 per month for.
And I have no doubt Swift gets a better rate than little old me with a Verizon MiFi.

The videos that Swift sends out are no way near that resolution though, so they don't take near the bandwidth. 15-20% of it, probably, at most.
Even with cheaper rates, they would have to be very careful about what they choose to download.
Unless they could work an unlimited deal for 10-20 grand per month... or whatever they think they can afford for whatever the ISP will provide.

I wonder how much they are paying the road spy's to film a couple dozen of us per month.

 

None of that addresses lag time though. Qualcomm has a known lag time which usually averages about 20 minutes and has been known to be much longer at times. That means when Mr So and so looks at your position, what he's seeing is where you were 20 minutes ago. Then he says alrighty now I've got him, I'll just send a request for a live video dump. Which takes 10 to 20 minutes to hit your box. Then it starts dumping the video of where you are now which is about 40 minutes away from where he thought you were when he sent the request, and it takes another 20 to 30 minutes before the video of you, now parked and not even in the truck anymore or sailing merrily down the interstate in light traffic, gets back to his desk.

Because remember, these systems store less than 2 minutes of video before they over write it or send it. In order to do what you're proposing, the systems would need to store about an hour of video which isn't really tough to do. But then it would need to upload that entire hour everytime they sent a request because with the lag times involved there would be no other way to guarantee they'd be getting video from the time and place they were looking for. And then that warm body would have sift through that entire hour.

And now you're right back to tons of expense for no useful output 99% of the time. If you think the shareholders will sit still for that, you've got more faith in investors than I do.