MESA, ARIZONA - Road Safety International, Inc. released their new RS-3001 On-Board Computer for automotive durability testing applications. When General Motors was looking to replace 125 tachographs with on-board computers, they contacted Road Safety.

"Road Safety has a great reputation with a lot of GM Corporate Field Testing groups, so when we were looking for a better way to conduct testing at DPG, we gave them a call," says Roland Schellenburg, Automotive Test Engineer for General Motors. "In just two weeks they developed and delivered a system that did everything we asked."

Road Safety designed and built a driver's visual aid to interface with the RS-3001 on-board computer. Using a series of multi-colored LED's, the visual aid gives immediate feedback to drivers for light, medium, and hard accelerations and decelerations. "It's amazing, the light followed my foot," said Rowena, GM Test Driver. "The visual aid makes it easy to drive the car the way the engineers expect it to be driven." At GM's request, a manually activated audible timer was also included. This timer helps drivers comply with GM testing procedures.

The Road Safety on-board computer gathers data by communicating with vehicle computer systems using a DLC interface. This significantly reduces system installation costs by providing speed, rpm, ignition and other inputs to the on-board computer by simply plugging into the DLC rather than connecting to each of the individual vehicle sensors.

GM decided to take advantage of the Road Safety automatic RF download option. Using a 900 MHz data transceiver, vehicle and driver data is transmitted directly to a desktop computer, automatically and without any human intervention. The transceiver is FCC Part 15 exempt, requires no licensing and all data transmissions are free. "RF downloading is very important to us," says Schellenburg. "When running as many vehicles as we do around the clock, it's a great time and money saver to have all the data waiting at my desk when I get to work in the morning." Adds Schellenburg, "Road Safety reports are very impressive, especially the large amounts of second by second data they give me."

GM plans to utilize the flexible and powerful Road Safety database reports to evaluate automotive durability testing results. However, since the database is SQL compatible, GM can create their own custom reports using most SQL servers, including MS Access, Excel and Word.

Road Safety International, Inc. is a privately held company with headquarters in Camarillo, California. Road Safety is an industry leader in the field of data acquisition systems, fleet management systems and driver training programs.