SANDESTIN, Fla. (Feb. 14, 2005) — The joint venture between Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems and Dana Corp.’s Heavy Vehicle Technologies and Systems Group, announced in June 2004, is taking shape and quickly starting to gain momentum.

The new organization, Bendix Spicer Foundation Brake LLC (BSFB), brings together the expertise and capacity of the two partners to deliver the latest advances in foundation brake technology and engineering to the end user.

The two companies had been discussing the potential of a joint venture for some time, but when the U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced revisions to its commercial vehicle stopping distance requirements last year, Kishor Pendse, president of the joint venture, said it made sense to bring the two organizations together.

“We decided to pool our resources and bring our combined expertise to bear on the problem,” Pendse said recently at a Bendix national sales meeting in Sandestin, Fla. “It seemed, from both perspectives, to be the right time to bring it all together.”

The joint venture will focus on three core areas of combined expertise; air-disc braking systems, air-drum braking systems, and specialty wheel-end products such as friction materials and brake actuator systems (manual and automatic slack adjusters and brake chambers).

Pendse said the two companies achieved a combined $240 million in sales last year, but the immediate goal is to double that over the next four to five years. “We intend to accomplish that through product development, streamlined marketing and brand consolidation, and improved customer service,” he says.

BSFB will capitalize on the strengths of each organization to reach the market in three distinct channels. Bendix Spicer will use the Eaton-Dana Roadranger organization to serve the end user (fleets and dealers), the combined strengths of both Bendix and Dana will be used to market to OEMs and the aftermarket, and the branding issues will be streamlined with most of the product offerings from Dana, Spicer, and Bendix eventually carrying only the “Bendix” brand name.

In the process of amalgamating the two huge organization, BSFB will retain engineering and technical facilities at Kalamazoo, Mich. and Elyria, Ohio, while consolidating distribution tasks to an existing Bendix facility in Huntington, Ind. Existing Roadranger and Bendix part numbers, some 20,000 of them, are being integrated, while redundant numbers are being eliminated.

Warranty terms and conditions will remain the same. The transition should be seamless to the customer, but certain tasks, such as product returns, should actually become simpler.

BSFB has set up a toll-free number for customer inquiries about the joint venture and its products: 866-610-9709.

As for the long term, Pendse says the company will continue to make significant investment in R&D in both air-disc and air-drum braking systems.

“You’ll see continued advancements in drum-brake technology while we develop disc brakes. “Pendse says. “The North American transition from drums to discs will not happen overnight. And we see huge markets in China, Russia, and India for drum brakes and related wheel-end products, so we’ll be leveraging the global position of the parent company, Knorr-Bremse Group, to upgrade our North American focus to a global focus.”