Iteris Inc. has announced that Prime Inc., a Missouri-based carrier, will offer Iteris’ Lane Departure Warning (LDW) system as standard equipment on its fleet of 2,600 leased and company-owned trucks.

Prime has already installed more than 100 Iteris LDW systems and expects to have its company-owned trucks fully outfitted within the year. LDW systems will also be made available to drivers of leased trucks at no additional cost on their lease and will be installed at Prime Inc.'s Springfield facilities.
Don Lacy, director of safety for Prime Inc., said, "We are confident that having the Lane Departure Warning technology standard on our trucks will enhance our efforts to make our highways safer for both our associates and the driving public."
The decision by Prime to offer Iteris' LDW technology as a standard feature on its fleet of company-owned and leased trucks came after months of comprehensive field testing. The addition of Prime, the largest U.S. fleet to make the Iteris LDW system standard to date, brings the total number of fleets specifying the system to 25 with a combined fleet size of nearly 13,000 trucks. There are another 50 fleets with approximately 105,000 trucks conducting field tests.
According to a report to Congress just released by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), 32 percent of accidents involving large trucks are the result of crossing over the lane line or departing from the roadway. This type of event was the single-largest cause of truck accidents reported where the truck was the critical reason.
Iteris' LDW system was the first of its kind to be deployed in the commercial truck and passenger car markets, and still remains the only vision-based system in mass production in Europe and the U.S.
LDW is designed to prevent sideswipe, run-off-road and inadvertent lane-change accidents that are usually caused by driver drowsiness, fatigue or distraction. The system uses a windshield-mounted camera that tracks lane markings using image-recognition software and proprietary algorithms, which monitor the relative position of the truck within the lane. If the truck inadvertently crosses the lane markings, the system automatically emits a distinctive rumble strip sound alerting the driver to make a correction. More than 20,000 LDW systems have been sold for commercial truck platforms in the U.S. and Europe with an estimated billion miles traveled per year.