Record-breaking World Premiere of Freightliner Inspiration Truck on Hoover Dam

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May 06, 2015, 12:01 ET

LAS VEGAS, May 6, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Almost 80 years after its official opening, the famous Hoover Dam was the setting for the World Premiere of the Freightliner Inspiration Truck. Doing double duty holding back trillion gallons of water and generating electricity for Las Vegas and California, the dam served as the largest projection screen ever in North America. This projection -- at 1.17 million lumens -- earned Freightliner the Guinness World Record of highest light output projection ever and, with the Freightliner Inspiration Truck, Daimler introduced the world's first autonomous truck licensed to drive on public roads at the historic concrete arch-gravity dam in southeastern Nevada.

"The Hoover Dam provides the ideal setting for a debut as significant to the trucking industry as this. Not only was it built primarily using trucks, but it signifies inspiration like few other structures in the world. To show the significance and opportunities of autonomous driving functions for the global trucking industry we were willing to go ways that people did not dare to think about before," emphasized Dr. Wolfgang Bernhard, Member of the Board of Management of Daimler AG, Daimler Trucks and Buses. "The Inspiration Truck's debut was made even more notable with Freightliner's Guinness World Record of the highest light output projection ever." To give this historic event a fitting, monumental backdrop, 60 projectors at 26,000 watts each projected the 30-minute presentation that introduced the Inspiration Truck. In a spectacular finish of the reveal, the truck drove onto the Hoover Dam in the desert of Nevada. This unique video screening was projected onto a surface of a little over 420,000 square feet. This is equal to almost nine football fields and over 87 average-size IMAX screens.

To achieve this, the 60 projectors were synchronized to create an image with a resolution of 4592 x 2048 pixels on the dam a half-mile away. In addition to the complexity of the projector setup, the output of the projectors was impressive in itself. Together the 60 units generated about 1.17 million lumens, which is equivalent to the output of more than 1,400 60-watt household light bulbs and an official world record among projections.

Using the Hoover Dam as North America's largest projection screen was an enormous undertaking, requiring months of planning, preparation and setup. The technology used at the Hoover Dam has never been applied before on a scale this massive, with such a large screen requiring a high amount of light output. Used tonight, video projection mapping – the relatively new technique of using specialized software to warp and mask a projected image – allows for images to fit onto irregularly shaped screens. Being a curved surface, Hoover Dam most certainly fits into this category.

About Daimler Trucks North America
Daimler Trucks North America LLC, with headquarters in Portland, Oregon, is the leading heavy-duty truck manufacturer in North America. DTNA produces and markets vehicles of the Freightliner, Western Star, and Thomas Built Buses brands. The DTNA production network encompasses nine locations. In addition to the headquarters and manufacturing plant in Portland (Oregon), DTNA has four manufacturing plants in North Carolina (Cleveland, Gastonia, High Point, and Mount Holly) and one manufacturing plant each in Redford (Michigan) and Gaffney (South Carolina). DTNA has two additional manufacturing facilities in Mexico (Saltillo and Santiago Tianguistenco).