Alright, ignore that this is a terrible ad from Samsung, a massive South Korean multinational conglomerate that also dabbles in surveillance and weapons technology, for a second and just BASK IN THE GENIUS. Mostly because it seems like one of those brilliant ideas that everyone should’ve thought of before but didn’t.
If you’ve ever been stuck behind a truck on a narrow two-lane road before, you know how annoying that can be. The truck is slow as hell, and you want to pass it. Only thing is you can’t, because the truck is so enormous that you can’t see if there’s another equally massive truck heading the other way, ready to crush your face into an unrolled blintz the second you pull out to pass.
Normally, you either risk it because you’re a maniac like us, or you just sit there and let your blood pressure rise for a little while.
But Samsung’s Argentina branch saw this sort of thing, and saw that it was Bad. So to make it Good, they just hooked up a camera to the front of a truck, and then a whole bunch of TVs to the back of the truck. The TVs on the back display what’s going on in front, so you can see if your face will or will not indeed become blintzified once you try to pass.
It’s absurdly simple, really, when you consider that the sort of technology to make this happen has been around for over a decade now.
Alas, it’s also painfully obvious why it’s almost certain you’ll never see it on actual roads. Truckers and trucking companies can operate on some pretty tight margins, and the added cost of fitting the system to a truck, plus the price of fuel lost due to the added weight, virtually guarantees no company would ever go for it.
We can, however, dream.
Contact the author at ballaban@jalopnik.com.
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via Gizmodo
Giving A Truck A Camera And A TV Is The Best Idea We Never Thought Of