Midland Quarry Products

We have a total of 186 vehicles, all of which are Tippers. 90% of the fleet are Scania and Volvo, however we now have a few DAFs and Renaults.

The biggest challenge before the systems were installed was defending the driver against spurious complaints against them. Our fleet only had a single camera at the front which recorded when there was a violent shock to it. We attended the Commercial Vehicle Show a few years ago and saw Brigade at the show first, demonstrating their camera systems. When we first had a camera system installed, it was initially for insurance purposes but it soon became obvious they would be useful in many situations.

Front and rear strobe lights – installed to meet FORS standard whenever they are visiting customer sites/their own sites.

4 sensor cycle minder – alerts the driver to any VRU’s (Vulnerable Road Users) that could be in a potential blind spot down the nearside of the vehicle.

5 camera system – this includes a forward-facing camera, 2 side view cameras (located on each wing) a reverse camera and a driver camera.

BBS white noise reverse alarm.

Yes. At the end of 2016/start of 2017 we started to spec Driver cameras too. We had 4 vehicles come off the road in a short period of time, and the external cameras didn’t show us why. Now every new lorry we have MUST have a driver cam installed into it, so we can fully assess what has happened if the vehicle was involved in an incident.

Yes. We have a regularly meeting with our insurance company to check everything over, and we’ve managed to save money so we’ve been able to spend this elsewhere in the business! To continue with this, we have now said that every vehicle we lease must have a minimum of 4 cameras on it.

The majority of our drivers do use it. As previously mentioned, our main purpose for having such a system installed was for insurance purposes. From a company perspective, we have provided the footage recorded which has helped with the speed of claims been put through – and a few headaches off the back of this! It protects the operator against unjust claims from other road users or site operatives.

We had a bit of ‘friction’ at the start when we first installed the driver cameras. However, once we let them know that the camera only records whenever the vehicle is turned on and isn’t recording during break times they became more understanding. It was all about education.

As all of our vehicles are Franchisee’s, we can’t specify as part of the manufacturing process that we’d like the system installing. We specify that we would like an SM UK system installing onto the vehicle, when the supplier is preparing the vehicles for our use. If we’ve ever had a problem, a specialist at SM UK has spoken us through how to fix the issue. If this wasn’t possible, they have arranged for an engineer to visit our site to have a look at it at a time that was convenient for both of us.

We find SM UK easy to work with and have built a good relationship with the team there.