With the new year comes new predictions for what 2016 will hold for the industry and OEM resolutions for the coming year. Fleet Equipment caught up with Bill Kozek, president of Navistar, Truck and Parts, to take a look inside the OEM’s crystal ball and see what the immediate future might hold.
“Our outlook is for another strong truck industry in 2016,” Kozek said. “Although we expect Class 8 industry volumes to be down slightly versus 2015, we do see strong economic growth continuing to drive new vehicle demand. In fact, we expect 2016 to have similar industry volume to 2014, which most industry observers would agree was a pretty good year.
“International Truck’s focus in the heavy-duty market this year will be continuing to get in front of as many customers as we can and continuing to tell its story,” Kozek continued. “The ProStar is just one of the main characters of that story. It’s been a little more than a year since the introduction of the ProStar efficiency specification (ES) package, which boasts tractor aerodynamics, a choice of the Eaton Fuller Advantage automated transmission or Navistar’s proprietary SCR-based 13-liter engine and the Eaton Fuller Advantage automated transmission, and a three-year subscription to OnCommand Connection.
“Since we introduced this vehicle last fall, many customers have added it to their fleets,” he explained. “Our intent was for this vehicle to have a fuel economy improvement of over 13% versus a 2010 ProStar with a MaxxForce 13 engine. A year later, this level of improvement has been confirmed by many customers. In some duty cycles, it’s not unusual for customers to report fuel economy over nine MPG range, with some customers getting as high as 10 miles per gallon.”
OnCommand Connection is another big bookmark in the International Truck story. With more than 165,000 trucks running OnCommand Connection, the open architecture telematics system has seen many firsts and will continue to lead the way, especially in areas such as over-the-air (OTA) ECU updates via a WiFi network, which will be available on model year 2017 International trucks powered by proprietary N9, N10 and N13 engines.
“Fleets can’t wait to get started. What we’ve heard from customers is that, with today’s diesel engines and their sophisticated electronic controls, the time it has been taking to reprogram these vehicles has an adverse effect on their uptime,” Kozek said. “Today, in order to have the ECM reprogrammed, customers have to either take the vehicles into their dealership or have a technician directly plug a device into each truck. That can be a burden for a truck driver or a fleet that is working hard to keep a truck moving each and every day.”
Kozek went on to explain that OTA reprogramming will allow fleets to update their ECM through a secure Wi-Fi connection. The service manager will simply re-flash the ECM when the vehicle is domiciled at its home base. The process is similar to a software update to a smart phone. This makes a substantial contribution to improved uptime, as the truck will no longer need to go back to a dealership to have this update performed.
The next logical step is to allow over-the-air updates through a cellular network, but Kozek was quick to note that data security is of the utmost importance and that the evolution of OTA updates needs to happen organically.
“Wi-Fi is a great first step, because reprogramming via Wi-Fi assures that the update will take place when the vehicle is at its home base instead of potentially interrupting the driver’s schedule,” he said. “Over time, the industry can determine the best procedures for cellular-based reprogramming.”
