I am in complete agreement with this idea but why do we have to give out the mirrors for free?
If we have to buy breath testers to be legal in France then the same should apply to any lorry drivers entering this country and have mirrors already fitted before they arrive or else refusal of entry and/or a fine.
Whats good for the goose...........
I quite agree, but was shot down in no uncertain terms a few years ago here when i dared to suggest such a thing as foreign truck owners might have to pay for their own safety equipment, UK charity.com lives.
Drove a new Volvo lorrry a few weeks ago, seemed to have some sort of LED warning when an object was in what is loosely known as a blind spot, so such system are definately on the way.
I'll now disagree with much of what this thread is about.
Modern lorries equipped with the correct mirrors do not have a blind spot anywhere, but there are certain conditions that have to be met.
Firstly that the windows and mirrors are kept clean, secondly that mirrors are correctly adjusted and overlap coverage of each other (most are woefully adjusted on RHD as well as LHD lorries), and thirdly most importantly that the driver is competent and actually uses the mirrors correctly...this is where it all falls down, hence the ongoing problems.
I'll qualify this, my sis has been driving a LHD artic for the past 10 or more years, shes driven lorries longer than i have and i'm up to 36 years full time now, she doesn't have blind spot problems because she's competent through years of use and having to manage real lorries that didn't drive themselves...from the days when you had to be a lorry driver to drive a lorry....she uses traffic to ''sweep'' the offside of her vehicle before pulling out when in the UK, in other words she selects an approaching vehicle and watches its approach and departure from alongside, then by closely monitoring the situation she knows the road beside her in the danger zone is cleared, but she checks the Down mirror during the pull out in case someone on the outside lane pulls alongside at that precise moment.
There are other problems with modern trucks, too high and too few windows often set too high to be of any use.
At one time all our lorries had rear and side rear windows fitted, with good reason, they provided all round vision, end of.
We'll end up with all sort of devices and clever electronics to prevent such things happening, as with much of this progress it has the unpleasant result of the dumbing down of the job, which means more rubbish to replace skill, an ongoing circle.
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