How many times have you witnessed an accident where one vehicle rear-ended the other? Such accidents typically happen because the driver of the back vehicle wasn’t paying attention to the road. While rear-end accidents can be dangerous with cars, they are even more so dangerous with eighteen wheeler trucks, due to their huge size.

To help prevent these trucks from rear ending other vehicles, Volvo Trucks has developed a new ‘Collision Warning with Emergency Brake’ system which has the ability to stop quickly stop speeding trucks. Check it out:

How cool is that? Keep in mind that is a fully-loaded 40 ton truck.

According to Volvo, this system has the ability to prevent collisions of relative speeds up to 70 km/h (43.5 mph) and works with stationary or moving targets. In other words, the system will prevent a collision between a truck and another vehicle when the truck is going 70 km/h (or less) faster than the other vehicle.

The system uses radar and camera to keep track of vehicles in front of trucks. If the system detects that the truck will hit the vehicle in front of it at the truck’s current speed, the system displays a red light as a warning to the driver. If the driver does not make any speed or steering adjustments, the warnings start flashing and beeping. If the driver still makes no adjustments, the truck automatically starts to slowly brake. If slowly brake is not good enough to prevent the collision, the emergency brake is activated to do whatever is possible to stop the truck.

Interestingly enough, these types of braking systems are required to be in all new trucks in the European Union starting November 2015. I’m not sure if other countries, such as the United States, have introduced or plan on introducing similar legislation.

[via Volvo]