GREENBELT, Md. – The future of commercial vehicle enforcement is hardly child’s play, but it is being described with a childlike voice and some stop-motion animation.

Welcome to the Future of Commercial Vehicle Safety and Enforcement, a production of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA), explores the promise of safety technologies, electronic inspections, and targeted enforcement efforts.

“Only a fraction of trucks on the road are being inspected every year,” a narrator says, as the ratchets from load securement straps are repurposed to serve as animated trucks on a cardboard highway. “Imagine how many lives could be saved if there was a way to constantly monitor them and their drivers and take the bad ones off the road.”

The presented answers come in the form of technologies like those that monitor everything from tire pressure to brake performance, the surrounding traffic, and drivers themselves.

“Eventually trucks will be able to drive themselves. The drivers of today will become vehicle operators that focus on parts of the job other than steering,” the narrator says.

The CVSA envisions a future that includes vehicle-to-everything applications that connect trucks to other vehicles, infrastructure, pedestrians and enforcement. There would be alerts for drivers about everything from inclement weather to bridge height restrictions and road conditions. The trucks themselves would be supported through technologies that keep vehicles centered in lanes, apply automatic emergency braking, and control steering.

Such a future would be supported by measures such as North American Standard Level 8 Electronic Inspections, and universal electronic identification measures, the CVSA says.