Bose Corp. Unveils Sophisticated Truck Seat Designed to Ease Wear and Tear on Drivers

This story appears in the Feb. 1 print edition of Transport Topics.

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. — Bose Corp., the acoustics company best known for its high-end audio equipment and noise-canceling headphones, last week unveiled a sophisticated heavy-duty truck seat designed to ease the wear and tear on drivers.

At a daylong press event held here Jan. 27, company executives said the seat would ease driver fatigue, combat widespread back pain and improve driver communication.

Called the Bose Ride System, the seat will go into production in March. Though pricing is not yet firm, it is likely to carry a price tag “in the high four figures,” said Mike Rosen, chief engineer of Bose’s Research and Development Group.

That estimated price is more expensive than existing high-end truck seats, the company said.

Rosen said the company began to study the trucking industry in 1994 after “a challenge we found in over-the-road trucking,” namely the physical damage to drivers that continual whole-body vibration was causing.

In a statement, the company said vibration reduces driver comfort, adds to fatigue and stresses the spine and neck.

“These issues,” the company said, “can contribute to many of the industry’s challenges, including driver retention, health-care costs and accidents — factors that impact and disrupt business.”

The company said its high-tech seat instantaneously responds to bumps and counters the movement with a high-power electromagnetic actuator it developed for this product. The effect of the actuator is to keep the driver steady while his truck bounces and swerves.

Officials said their seat was a vast improvement over even the high-end, air-glide seats some drivers use, and they demonstrated the differences in a simulator housed in a Bose highway trailer.

The seat “will dramatically improve driver comfort,” said Jim Parison, principal research engineer for Rosen’s group and the leader on the team to develop the truck seat.

Amar Bose, who is chairman of the company he founded in 1964, said the project “really started in 1958,” when he bought a Pontiac with air drive. His interest in the car’s suspension system has kept him involved in vehicle suspensions, and the company has been working on a system for passenger cars since 1980.

Bose, a retired professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that “it’s still not a product” but that the company is working with a European car maker and should come to market soon.

In a later interview, he said the truck seat project probably would not have been possible if Bose Corp. were a public company because it isn’t likely to yield positive financial returns for several years. The company is able to proceed on projects “which we know will do good” and it is able to see if projects can be made into profitable products after their development, he said.

As an example, he said the company’s noise-canceling headphones lost millions of dollars over many years before they became a big hit with consumers.

Rosen said that consumers were unaware of the background noise when they were on airplanes until the company introduced its headphones. People who tried them were quick converts, he said, and the product since has gained acceptance.

Bose also said the company is hopeful its new seat will help fleets and drivers realize just how much vibration is affecting the industry, and they will embrace their product as the solution.

Bose will target fleets with its initial marketing, officials said, and will offer it only as an aftermarket product for now. They said their seat uses the same power and air connections as existing air-ride seats, but it needs an additional storage battery.

Though the seat uses up to 3,500 watts, officials said it was primarily self-perpetuating, and it draws from the truck about the power needed to light only a 50-watt bulb.

Rosen estimated that the trucking industry spends $68 billion a year on driver turnover and driver health-care problems and that Bose hopes to convince fleets its seat could help with both issues by increasing job satisfaction and reducing back pain.