Bendix Promotes Safety Tech, Air Disc Brakes
This story appears in the March 27 print edition of Transport Topics.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The rising adoption of active safety technology and air disc brakes is building a stronger foundation for the movement toward autonomous trucks, executives with Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems said here at the Mid-America Trucking Show.
Bendix Chairman Joe McAleese said he believes the fully autonomous truck with no driver is still a “very long way off,” but the industry will get there by building upon today’s safety technologies such as electronic stability control, which soon will be mandated by the federal government, and collision mitigation, which is achieving higher market penetration.
“Those are the basis for the future autonomous vehicles, and those functions are being accepted very widely,” McAleese said during the March 22 press briefing.
The next phase in that evolution involves the combination of multiple sensor technologies and functions, said Fred Andersky, director of customer solutions for controls at Bendix, who pointed to the company’s latest collision-mitigation system, Wingman Fusion, as an example of that approach. Fusion integrates camera and radar sensors and the braking system to monitor the vehicle’s surroundings and prevent crashes.
“You see the future starting to come together,” Andersky said.
Bendix introduced Fusion in 2015, the third iteration of Wingman. The company is developing a second generation of that system that will include more features and higher levels of performance, he said, adding that the company would announce more details later this year. Current Fusion users will be able to upgrade to the new version when it becomes available.
Beyond that, Bendix plans to integrate blind-spot technology into its active safety systems to help prevent sideswipe crashes, Andersky said.
Bendix also is developing retrofit kits that would help fleets upgrade from one technology to the next on their existing vehicles.
“Fleets, when they add a technology, don’t want to have it just on their new trucks. They want to add it on all the trucks they have in their fleet,” Andersky said.
Meanwhile, the shorter stopping distances enabled by air disc brakes, compared with drum brakes, also will help support automated driving technologies and truck platooning, Bendix said.
Air disc brakes will be important not only for the tractor but for the trailer as well, said Keith McComsey, director of marketing and customer solutions for wheel-end products at Bendix Spicer Foundation Brake.
“We can’t forget about the trailer,” he said. “It really plays an important role in reducing stopping distances.”
Air disc brakes also help keep the trailer behind the tractor during hard braking events, he added.
McComsey said market penetration for air disc brakes in 2016 was about 16% for trucks and 6% for trailers, but projected that those figures would to climb to 27% and 20%, respectively, by 2020.
Improvements to other vehicle systems also will help enable more advanced automated driving features. Suppliers will need to ensure the cleanliness of the air that supports not only the brakes but also automated manual transmissions and emission controls, Andersky said. Better data connections between the tractor and trailer also will be important, he added.
Andersky said the implementation of autonomous driving systems is not just about the technology itself but business and other factors surrounding it.
First, fleet customers will need to see a return on investment, he said. “Nobody is going to pay $30,000 to $50,000 on adaptive cruise control with steering.”
At the same time, society will need to understand and accept the technology, and legislation and regulation will need to enable it.
Andersky predicted that autonomous vehicle technology would likely take hold in passenger cars earlier than in trucking, due in part to economies of scale from the higher volumes in the automotive market.
In the meantime, Bendix cited greater deployment of its active safety technologies.
Bendix said more than 200,000 of its forward-collision warning and mitigation systems are on the road today, with adoption of collision mitigation more than tripling over the past five years.
The company said its electronic stability control system, first introduced in 2005, has now been equipped on more than 500,000 vehicles.
Andersky predicted that figure could rise to 600,000 by next year, driven by the federal government’s stability control mandate, which applies to new Classes 7 and 8 tractors built on or after Aug. 1.
Also at MATS, Kenworth Truck Co. and Peterbilt Motors Co. announced that they would make Bendix’s radar-based Wingman Advanced system standard on their T680 and Model 579 on-highway trucks in July. Navistar announced in September that its new LT Series model would come standard with Wingman Advanced.
Competitors to Bendix in active safety systems include Meritor Wabco and Detroit Assurance by Daimler Trucks.
