Freight

The design and general operation of heavy vehicles in Australia is controlled by Australian Design Rules (ADRs) and separate regulations within each jurisdiction. The regulations provide control over mass and dimension limits, and the ADRs address a range of other operational and safety issues. The regulations as they stand do not address a number of critical issues that relate to the on-road safety-related performance of heavy vehicles, including stability, handling and controllability, tracking, acceleration and gradeability. As such, the on-road performance characteristics of heavy vehicles are largely determined by vehicle design engineers, manufacturers and the needs of the transport industry and operators. This publication details the output of a project that aimed to: 1) identify and develop a range of objective performance measures that could be used to evaluate the safety-related performance of heavy vehicles, and 2) determine minimum performance levels that could be applied to the performance measures for heavy vehicle evaluations.