Heavy Duty Trucking

MAY 2014

The Fleet Business Authority

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56 HDT • MAY 2014 www.truckinginfo.com "We found there was a lot of room for improvement in some of the cab designs, especially related to entry and exit as well as how the seat and dash are positioned relative to the pedals," says Scott Perry, Ryder's vice president of supply management. "Externally, we saw the need to lighten the pull pres- sure on some fifth-wheel locks. We saw hoods that were a little heavy, so there's room for lift-assist devices or lighter hoods. There's a lot when you get into it. Ryder is moving forward with some of these changes and we're pushing the OEs to go further." Driver comfort It's one thing to shoehorn larger or smaller bodies into the cab. It's another to keep them comfortable and satisfied with the environment. Seating plays an important role, since that's figuratively where the rubber meets the road. Volvo's Spence advises that seats from different manufacturers come in different widths to accommodate differ- ent behinds. "Seats are customer choice items, so the seat you choose should be one that will keep you happy," he says. In bygone days, truck and cab design seems to have been driven by form rather than function. Compare, for example the Mack R-model or the Peterbilt 359 cabs to the present models. Although many drivers miss the classic look, they also were smaller, noisier, hotter, had less room and were measurably less human-friendly. Mack's construction product market- ing manager, Stu Russoli, says the Mack cab, with its history in the construction and severe service sectors, has undergone quite a transformation in accommodating non-traditional sized drivers while bring- ing a distinctive style to the product. "Styling is very important, and it's a fine line between too trucky and too automotive," he says. "Today we have a wide variety of expectations to meet, from the old-guard driver to the younger people who want their truck to look and feel like a car. We are con- stantly surveying to stay ahead of what the market seems to want." Research for the Saunders Study was done more than 40 years ago, and it served designers well for a long time. We can be sure, with the emergence of a different sort of truck driver, that the next round of significant changes won't wait that long. ■ Alarming alarms C onversations about the in-cab environment also are increasingly address- ing the question of how to best deal with the amount of information being served up to drivers in todays' trucks. The last thing a driver needs when something is going wrong is a confus- ing message about what's going wrong. We've seen a proliferation of warning devices in truck cabs, and as yet, there are no standards for all those sounds and blinking lights. T.J. Reed, director of product marketing at Freightliner Trucks, says a warn- ing should alert the driver to the problem, while keeping the driver's eyes fo- cused on the road and their hands on the wheel, not get them searching around wondering what the beep or buzzer means. "Secondary devices that require an individual gauge or a module that goes to the B-panel is something else to search for on the dash," he says. "We're integrating these warnings into the cluster, right in front of drivers where they can see it." But since the A panel on most trucks is getting pretty full, where do we put the additional warning lamps? Heads-up displays, or HUDs, are one option. HUDs are still in the advanced concepts realm at the moment, says Andy Weiblen, Peterbilt's assistant chief engineer. "Some are projected onto windshields, but windshields in trucks are tricky," he says. "They frequently need to be replaced, so having an embedded display wouldn't work because the HUD would increase the replacement cost." Instead, Weiblen is looking at projection technology that would be dash- mounted and displayed through a signal combiner mounted on top of the dash. "You can still see through it, but it would not be subject to the replacement costs," he says. "Regardless of how we do it, we want to make sure the driver's eyes remain focused on the road. We want the display as close to the line of sight as possible, as opposed to a gauge on the far right side that is blinking red." A number of years ago, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters tried to write into its National Freight Agreement a "belly- room clause." Women In Trucking says more than 200,000 women are employed as drivers, prompting truck makers and fleets to evaluate how well their trucks meet women's needs. e r g o n o m i c s _ m a y . i n d d 5 6 ergonomics_may.indd 56 4 / 2 9 / 1 4 3 : 5 2 P M 4/29/14 3:52 PM

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