Officials Predict More Efficiency Gains as Onboard Truck Technology Matures

This story appears in the Oct. 22 print edition of Transport Topics.

LAS VEGAS — The rapid progression of onboard technology has transformed the trucking industry, and new advances will continue to drive efficiency, technology executives said.

Brett Brinton, CEO of telematics provider Zonar Systems, predicted that fleets soon will be able to adjust their trucks’ engine settings — such as maximum speed — remotely over the Internet.

“Right now, you have to go out and manually touch every truck, and when’s the last time all your trucks were in one place? Never. The ability to adjust the way your engine operates and do it with the click of a mouse is just around the corner,”

Brinton said at a panel discussion on Oct. 8 at American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference & Exhibition.

He said the “networked vehicle” is enabling fleet managers to give truckers real-time feedback on their driving performance.

“The ability to get back to your drivers and not only give them coaching feedback in real time, but to reward them for that behavior, is going to change the game,” he said.

The proliferation of onboard electronics is “providing tons of information that isn’t being taken advantage of in the industry,” said Greg Reimmuth, vice president of sales and marketing at Noregon Systems, Greensboro, N.C., a provider of diagnostic software.

To make the most of the data, Reimmuth recommended that fleets run total diagnostic routines on their vehicles — “every truck, every time.” That allows carriers to catch problems that might otherwise be missed or misdiagnosed during preventive maintenance and repair orders, he said.

Modern trucks can have about 15 different data feeds from the various onboard technologies, but in the future, truck manufacturers will become “mobile data content providers” by consolidating the data and providing them to customers and third-party technology providers, Brinton said.

“No longer will you have several disparate systems on your truck,” Brinton said. “You’ll be able to buy a truck and it’ll have a system onboard that is networked to the Internet to be able to provide you with data, no matter what telematics you use, no matter what you have in your truck.”

The industry’s third-party technology providers will still be present, “but they’ll be able to do their jobs better,” Brinton said.

An example of manufacturers providing mobile data is Detroit’s “virtual technician,” which Zonar developed for Daimler Trucks North America, he said.

The system transmits real-time remote engine diagnostics and proactively communicates with fleets and vehicle owners regarding potential performance issues and service scheduling.

“You’ll see all the [original equipment manufacturers] starting to adopt a similar product,” Brinton said.

The path to today’s connected vehicles began with the advent of electronically controlled engines in the late 1980s, said Paul Menig, CEO of consulting firm Tech-I-M. “With that base, the march of electronics to improve the operation of our trucks started.”

In the 1990s, truck manufacturers began to take advantage of all the information from the engine, and instrument clusters became electronic and attached to the data link.

“That was before we even had the word ‘telematics,’ ” Menig said. “This allowed fleets to track where their vehicles were, know if the engine was running, know what the driver’s hours of service were, know if the driver was braking too hard or if he was driving poorly.”