LAS VEGAS—For years, the annual Consumer Electronics Show has painted a bright future of self-driving vehicles and other AI-powered inventions that could replace humans. Paccar, the only major commercial trucking OEM at CES 2022, was touting its autonomous truck future. But the company is also pointing out that technology is for people. And what group of people can benefit from technology more than the humans driving trucks across the globe?
After making its debut at CES in 2018 with an autonomous Peterbilt, the company's past concepts displayed outside the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center have become actual fleet products. Paccar executives who sat down with FleetOwner this week said it was important to show off the power of truck technologies that are making the roads safer, the air cleaner, and drivers less stressed.
“Over the years that Paccar has been displaying here at CES, we’ve seen the maturity of our products develop from a very early stage prototype that we were showing several years back to production today,” Stephan Olsen, general manager of the Paccar Innovation Center, told FleetOwner.
Just two years ago, at the last in-person CES, Paccar displayed three trucks on the Central Plaza: a prototype autonomous Kenworth T680, along with medium-duty battery-electric Peterbilt Model 520EV and Kenworth K270E, none of which were available at the time.
See also: CES 2022: Trucks, transportation, and delivery tech on display
Today, those two electric trucks are in production and part of fleets in several states. And Paccar now has a strategic agreement with Aurora, the self-driving technology company that went public in 2021. That partnership was at the center of Paccar’s CES 2022 booth, which featured a Peterbilt Model 579 equipped with the Aurora Driver system.
The midnight blue Peterbilt was flanked by two other heavy-duty, high-tech trucks: the electric Kenworth T680E, along with its Paccar battery charger and the DAF XG+, a European cabover with no physical mirrors.
Taking truck technology global
Dutch truck maker DAF won Europe’s 2022 International Truck of the Year Award for the new long-haul tractor. It features better fuel efficiency than its previous model, has a large interior sleeper cab, runs on Paccar Connect, and features many advanced driver assistance systems. Equipped with Paccar’s Digital Vision System—and thanks to E.U. regulation changes—the XG+ has no exterior mirrors; instead, it has HD camera displays inside the cab that show the driver all around the truck, day or night, in any weather condition.
“The same technology platform is available on Peterbilt trucks here in North America—however, regulations require us to have physical mirrors as well,” Olsen said.
Olsen’s Paccar Innovation Center in Silicon Valley has the DAF truck as a development platform to explore integrating some of its technology and other new technology to create even more advanced driver assistance. ‘Things like making the truck safer around vulnerable road users, helping the driver with lane changes on crowded interstates—looking multiple lanes over and giving the driver the assistance to make that change in confidence, understanding the closing speed of traffic around the truck,” he said. “We’re taking advantage of being in the Silicon Valley ecosystem to find those bits of technology, bring them on board the truck, and then understand if that is something that we want to invest in for a future product release down the road. That’s what we’re using that DAF truck as. As a platform for that work.”
Paccar’s global reach has its advantages, Olsen added. “Many of the underlying architecture of our vehicles are global in nature. So work that we do on a DAF in ADAS or electrification can be shared across the Paccar family and brought into Peterbilt trucks. We think that it’s a fantastic opportunity to share the developments in Europe with new products to the North American marketplace.
‘The driver is still the key’
While Level 4 autonomy development for self-driving trucks gets a lot of attention because it would take the driver out of the cab, Paccar is also investing a lot into Level 2 autonomy and other ways to ease a driver’s day, such as the Digital Vision System, Scott Newhouse, Peterbilt’s chief engineer, told FleetOwner.
“You talk a lot about safety. You talk a lot about efficiency,” he said. “The important thing that people may not be seeing when you see these technologies is we’re always focused on the driver as well. Because the driver is still the key to this being successful, they want to have a good, effective day behind the wheel.”
While he wouldn’t go into details, Newhouse said Peterbilt is working on technology it will release “in the next couple of years that will make the driver experience even better.” As the industry faces driver shortages, he sees technology helping alleviate it. “The driver is so important,” he later said. “You can’t let the technology lower the values that we need to bring to the drivers. Making the vehicles interesting will make people want to join this industry. This is a fantastic industry with fantastic opportunities for people to build careers. We need technology to bring new people into this industry. The importance of this industry to our country—to the world—is key. And the guys who do it today are superheroes.”
Olsen added: “Trucking is the perfect environment to develop automated technologies, electrification technologies, and connected technologies. There’s a business case where the technology pays the customer back over time. So we see a lot of opportunities to excite the next generation of talent to come into the trucking industry.”
Getting interactive with technology and the public
“We’ve been using CES as a platform to show the continued development of bringing technology to our customers,” Olsen said. Paccar also uses the show to continue its technology mission.
“We take the opportunity to have business development discussions, to look at the latest, greatest sensors that we can bring into driver systems technology or automated driving," Olsen added. "What advancements in battery management or charging solutions can we put into our next generation of electric vehicles to improve the efficiency range? So we see opportunities like that daily here to see a lot of businesses and startups who come to us to share what they have.”
On top of that, Newhouse said it gives the global truck maker opportunities to interact with people outside the trucking industry.
“It’s important that the public understand that the trucking industry—Peterbilt, Paccar, and our customers—is always working for safety, efficiency, just a better environment,” he said. “I’m not so sure that most people when they drive down the highway realize the technology we’re developing and our customers are investing in is to make sure it’s a safe vehicle.”
