WHAT A START TO 2019!

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JANUARY 9, 2019 Vol. 16 No. 1

The new year is only barely with us but already there’s been some very big news. It comes out of CES, formerly called the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, where trucks and truck makers have never been seen before. Well, not quite. Paccar broke the ice in 2018 with both of its main nameplates — Peterbilt brought a Level 4 autonomous truck, while Kenworth showed its hydrogen fuel cell truck. They were big hits, by all accounts.

CES first appeared on the scene in 1967 and for many years it was exactly what you might expect based on its original name — computers and TVs and eventually robots and the like. It has morphed into what is said to be the fifth largest automotive show in the U.S. The robots remain, along with companies like Intel, Mobileye, Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm, and about 4000 others. Not to mention 170,000 or so attendees, and more than 7000 media types, some of my colleagues included. It’s downright huge.

The show is going on as we speak, so I only have news as of Tuesday, the 8th, but big news it surely is.

Peterbilt is back, introducing the all-electric medium-duty Model 220EV. It joins the previously announced Model 520EV and the Model 579EV in the company’s electric lineup. Kenworth is also back, announcing that its relationship with Toyota is expanding. They’re joining forces to develop a test fleet of 10 fuel-cell electric trucks, building on research that both had been conducting independently. More on all that later, but first let’s go to Daimler Trucks North America, and Freightliner in particular.

DAIMLER DROPS PLATOONING DEVELOPMENT in favor of automation. Martin Daum, head of the Daimler Commercial Vehicles unit in Germany and former CEO of DTNA, said the benefits of platooning just aren’t enough to justify further investment.

“We will continue with the projects where we have ongoing commitments, but we will not be starting another venture project on platooning,” he said at a press event in Las Vegas preceding the CES show. He added that platooning produces very limited reductions in operating cost. “The technology we have to put into a truck does not [match] the savings our customers will see with automation.”

The fuel economy gains are modest at best, considering the technical resources required to make it happen, he said, so Daimler’s research budget would be better spent developing systems for SAE Level 4 automation.

Level 4? Wow, that means driverless trucks. And not that far off into the future.

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Rolf Lockwood is editor emeritus of Today's Trucking and a regular contributor to Trucknews.com.