February 14, 2007 Vol. 3, No. 4

If life always ran as planned, right now I’d be starting to wax poetic about the annual meeting of TMC – the
Technology and Maintenance Council – held last week in sunny Tampa, Fla. I did promise, after all. Sadly, for
the first time in 20 years, I wasn’t there. I had to cancel my trip at the last minute.

So while I can deliver most of the product news arising out of the week-long meeting, I didn’t get the chance to
feel the mood of attendees or talk to engineers about some of the issues that I’ve been interested in lately. It’s
such a great source of concentrated technical intelligence, and one I depend on to feed my editorial engine, that I’ll be feeling this gap for the rest of the year.

Still, my colleague Jim Park was there, and while he hasn’t been fully ‘debriefed’, I gather that one issue
seemed to dominate the gathering. Truck operators, he tells me, are already anxious about the engines they’ll
be forced to use when the next round of emissions standards kick in three years from now in 2010. What they
want, it seems, is more lead time. They want to have test engines in their hands and on the road at least 12 months before January 1, 2010, and preferably 18 months in advance. And they want to know very soon just what technology is going to be employed.

As most of you probably know, Freightliner and Mack/Volvo appear committed to selective catalytic reduction (SCR) as their 2010 solution. Caterpillar has said little on the subject. Cummins is keeping its options open, though it has SCR experience in Europe and says it can go that way if it’s found to be the right answer for North America.

Remember, though, as I wrote in the last Product Watch newsletter, the 6.7-liter Cummins Turbo Diesel engine
now available in 2008 Dodge Ram 2500 and 3500 heavy-duty pickup trucks and chassis cabs (see below) already meets 2010 Environmental Protection Agency standards. Without SCR. It uses a combination of in-cylinder technologies, a high-pressure common-rail fuel system, cooled exhaust-gas recirculation, and a variable-geometry turbocharger, plus exhaust aftertreatment technology including a NOx adsorber catalyst.

Cummins folks won’t say that this solution will or won’t work for heavy-duty engines in 2010, but I wouldn’t be
surprised if they go this way. Whatever works best, they say.

Speaking of Cummins, there was a nice bit of news out of TMC by way of a group I used to head, Truck Writers
of North America. Every year the continent’s trucking journalists choose a winner of the Technical Achievement
award and present a Grote-sponsored trophy at the TMC awards luncheon. The winner for 2006 is Cummins Filtration’s Fleetguard line of fuel and oil filters.

Beating out more than two dozen candidates, the new line of Fleetguard “User Friendly Filters” employs a shape that was reconfigured to allow filters to sit upright without tipping. Instead of metal, the body is reinforced nylon, so it won’t dent or rust. The filters install easily by hand and are removable with any standard half-inch-drive ratchet. Accidental cross-threading may ruin the filter, but never the engine.

Runners-up included the Eaton Fuller UltraShift LEP transmission, Freightliner’s rack & pinion steering system, and Michelin’s anti-splash tire technology.

Of the product introductions at TMC, the most significant was probably the new – and it’s really new – Eaton Vorad
VS400 collision warning system. It’s quite different from the system that’s been around for many years, and in
fact they’re not compatible at all. The older system will be phased out this summer when the next-generation
version is in full production. That starts in limited quantities in April.

There are several interesting features here: it’s modular; it’s been effectively integrated into the company’s Fleet Resource Manager safety package; and it has RF, cell, and GPS wireless capability built in. That means easy access to real-time information. There’s also a new LCD driver interface unit, making it much easier for the guy at the wheel to use the system.

The new radar unit, much smaller than the existing EVT-300 radar, replaces both that and the CPU and reduces the amount of wires from 18 to four. And you can use standard bumpers, not Vorad-specific ones.

One last note about this year’s TMC annual meeting. The only other Rolf I know, the Ontario Trucking Association’s technical guru Rolf Vanderzwaag, scored a bit of a coup by succeeding in getting a task force formed to look at Canadian brakes. It was Rolf who alerted the industry to a severe problem with some trailer brake systems a few years ago. I won’t get into it here, but in simple terms the issue is one of air supply and air demand, and the new task force will examine it in terms of compressor capacity. It’s a partial solution, but a first. As far as I’m aware, no TMC task force or study group has ever before addressed a specifically Canadian challenge.

Good on ya, Rolf.

This newsletter is published every two weeks. It’s a heads-up notice about what’s going on with trucking
technology as well as what you can see at www.todaystrucking.com where you’ll find in-detail coverage of nearly everything that’s new. Plus interesting products that may not have had the ‘air play’ they deserved within the last few months. Subscribe today!

If you have comments of whatever sort about Product Watch, or maybe a gizmo I should know about, please contact me at rlockwood@newcom.ca.