ITS America: Bundling Technology for Trucking

TT File Photo

WASHINGTON — Trucks cabs are business offices, and that’s the way manufacturers should configure them, said the chief executive of one of the nation’s largest truckload carriers.

“We can’t stick a table in the back and call it a place to put your laptop. It’s bizarre to think you have to run a wire out the window to hook up a computer,” Jeffrey Crowe, president of Landstar System, Jacksonville, Fla., said during commercial vehicle discussions at the Intelligent Transportation Society of America’s annual meeting last week.

Crowe was not the only voice calling for integration of communication and other technology advances within the truck as manufacturers design and build them. William Gouse, executive director of technology planning for Freightliner Corp., agreed that more technology must be incorporated early on in the production cycle.

“More and more should be added in the factory, because too much is added afterward now,” Gouse said.

Crowe said technology is essential to Landstar’s operating system, which is based not on truck drivers but on “business capacity owners” — drivers who own their trucks, make all the decisions and get paid based on a percentage of the load delivered rather than by the mile.

“We have a significant stake in delivering information to all these small businessmen throughout North America,” he said. “It’s not only the specific information you have to get, but who you have to get it to and when you need to get it to them.”

Discussion of applying new technology to commercial vehicles consumed at least two sessions of ITS America’s four-day conference — which also featured a hundred exhibitors at what the group billed as the largest exposition if its kind in the world. ITS American expected to attract 4,000 visitors to its meeting and expo, which ran from April 19 to 22.

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