July 17, 2019 Volume 1, Number 6

Diagnostics is pretty much as easy now as it was back in horse-and-buggy days. Really?

My tongue was deeply embedded in my cheek when I wrote words along those lines in a column that appeared a few months ago in both Today’s Trucking and Heavy Duty Trucking magazines. Here’s a bit more of that piece…

“Today, nothing’s as obvious as it could be in those buggy-wheel and earliest mechanical years, but the diagnostic art has changed radically and become easier than ever. The very concept of complexity gets redefined every day – but so do our tools.

“Ironically, our trucks are almost as transparent now as our horse-drawn wagons were. They’re wildly complex machines, but the vast array of data streaming out of them makes the diagnostics task no harder than seeing the bad spoke on a wooden wheel.

In theory. On a good day.”

It’s not really quite that easy, of course, but the tools now on offer to technicians are simply amazing.

These days there’s a truly withering array of diagnostic options offered by OEMs and about 2.4 million third-party providers. I exaggerate only a little, and that number makes it tough to choose the one you need. I expect that many of those providers and of course all the truck-makers will be on hand at the North American Commercial Vehicles  Show in Atlanta this fall (see below). Good chance to check them out.

Here’s one of the latest options…

CUMMINS AND FLEET COMPLETE CONNECT

These two outfits are working together on what seems like a very useful collaboration. Fleet Complete will offer Cummins Connected Diagnostics to customers using Cummins engines. Users will benefit from detailed reporting on faults as soon as they occur, saving time and money at the shop.

The Cummins diagnostics application is a value-added monitoring solution to customers using the Fleet Complete IoT platform with their Cummins engines. Users will be able to reduce unplanned downtime, improve overall vehicle maintenance planning, and avoid unnecessary expenses.

“Those clients who have their fleets running with Cummins engines will now be able to take advantage of a remote diagnostic monitoring application within the Fleet Complete platform,” says Tony Lourakis, CEO of Fleet Complete. “They will get easy-to-understand reports and actionable recommendations on engine-fault alerts in real time. This will save a considerable amount of money and time at a repair shop when the drivers can present a ready-made, prioritized list to the mechanic to start on the repairs straight away.”