December 31, 2014 Vol. 11 No. 27

It’s the end of a very eventful year, one that deserves a re-cap, but I’m on holiday so it’s going to be a brief one. Relatively brief, anyway. I don’t really do brief, do I?

There were five developments on the technology front that most captured my attention in 2014. The last two have nothing to do with trucks at present, but I predict they will in the future.

At the top of the list is one that none of us will see for quite a while, though many of you have been using elements of it for some years now. I mean the Mercedes-Benz Actros truck that does NOT operate driverless and does NOT entirely drive itself, though we’re calling it ‘autonomous’. In a sense it’s really just a collection of driver-assistance technologies from active cruise control to lane-departure warning and many others of that sort, all of them unified in new ways and linked to a decidedly forward-looking technology called V2V, or vehicle-to-vehicle communication.

The Future Truck 2025 is a mix of existing and new technologies, some of them drawn from the car world, some from trucks. Cameras and radar sensors and such, like the familiar driver-assistance technology we already know, the active cruise control, automatic braking, stability control, and lane-keeping systems. A new one known as ‘Predictive Powertrain Control’ uses satellite-sourced information about road topography and route characteristics to adjust the operation of the drivetrain in order to maximize fuel economy. Other such assistance systems will follow in the coming years, says Daimler.

Crucially, these ‘smart’ trucks will communicate with one another and with cars sharing the road, trading information about speed and position, and thus be able to ‘mingle’ on the road safely with little driver intervention, at least on highways and major roads. Daimler compares Highway Pilot to the autopilot system in an airplane.

Trucks will also ‘talk’ to the road and associated infrastructure like traffic lights, assessing all inputs and reacting accordingly.

I was in Germany back in July for its quite exciting launch and then again in September to see a further refined version of it. To hear the boss talk, this truck is just around the corner.