Tomorrow’s trucks
Truck technology is evolving at a rapid pace and Volvo is on the cutting edge, particularly in platooning.
“We demonstrated platooning in Europe more than four years ago, and we have been conducting ongoing research on autonomous vehicles,” Nyberg said. “Volvo Group’s investment in Peloton Technology certainly indicates our interest in platooning, which we see as having great promise for improving both fuel efficiency and safety. We recognize, of course, that it will take time for platooning and autonomous driving to gain public acceptance, and so the move will be gradual and in stages.
The regulatory environment remains challenging for vehicle manufacturers as state regulations concerning autonomous vehicles vary by state, even in the definitions of what is an autonomous vehicle.”
That said, Volvo isn’t waiting to develop the next generation of truck technology. The OE is currently using visualization tools to view truck telematics data over time and by various vehicle and customer attributes, providing insights into trends that otherwise might be very difficult to detect.
“For example, we have been able to isolate issues as simple as software bugs as a root cause, allowing us to solve the problem quickly,” Nyberg said. “The power of this capability will only grow as we extend the coverage of Remote Diagnostics to more components as we did earlier this year when we added monitoring of the Volvo I-Shift automated manual transmission.”
Looking ahead, greater connectivity within the truck will drive a shift in thinking about uptime toward preventing component failures rather than just responding to them. “We envision being able to pinpoint the optimal time to replace a component and to set maintenance schedules based on customers’ specific duty cycles,” Nyberg concluded.
