Every Ross Transport truck that leaves their Port Kembla yard, in Wollongong, south of Sydney, is fitted with three cameras, one on each wing mirror and one in the cab, facing forwards.
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Despite costing $6,500 each, along with GPS monitoring, owner Alan Ross said it was the best thing the company has ever done to invest in the set up, such was the headache his company was feeling from accidents with drivers where the truck driver was not at fault.
At the offices of Ross Transport, along with logbooks, job sheets and paper files are gigabytes of footage from drivers as they travel around Australia.
Each incident is recorded in writing and now on video, and collisions are accessible for insurance and education purposes.
A key issue for truck drivers and operators is motorists not being aware of the size of a vehicle's blind spots.
Being well over a metre off the ground in the cab and with the truck's nose another metre in front of that, a truck's blindspot can extend six metres in front of the vehicle, large enough to encompass a small car.
Similarly to the sides, a vehicle can be invisible to a truck driver when alongside.
This leads to trucks having a limited ability to react to vehicles immediately surrounding them, and particularly when other vehicles change lanes with little notice close to a truck.
Mr Ross said that drivers try to do their best to avoid accidents but that the general public was not aware of the risks involved.
"What people don't understand is that the vehicles are dangerous, and we have to drive them with respect."
In addition to the cameras and GPS monitoring, newer vehicles in the Ross Transport fleet come with lane changing devices that will alert the driver when they turn on their indicator that another vehicle is in the lane next to them.
"That is our biggest cause of accidents, changing lanes, because we have a blindspot there."
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While Mr Ross is motivated to install this technology on his fleet, he said that there needs to be a greater incentive for the technology to be adopted more widely across Australia's trucking industry, as customers choose based on cost and those who cut corners are not penalised.
"You put your tender in, with all the modern safety equipment, and they say it's too dear. The guy who gets it has got all old trucks."
To actually achieve zero fatalities on our roads, Mr Ross says that governments need to get serious about mandating standards for vehicles, whether that be collision avoidance technology in trucks or speed limiters for other motor vehicles.
"You drive down that coast road, how many trees do you see with flowers on them? There should be 30 metres on either side of the road cleared."
