Michael Kornhauser talks need for commercial vehicle navigation

“Whether you’re responsible for one truck, five trucks or 20,000 trucks, commercial navigation is a really essential tool for, on one hand, keeping your drivers safe, keeping them legal and ultimately providing more efficient routes. Truck navigation is really founded upon the fact [of] creating a truck’s safe and legal route for your driver, whether that be height restrictions, weight restrictions [or] maybe you’re hauling hazardous materials and need to have truck-safe routes for hazardous materials. … Whatever type of material you’re hauling, I think that truck-safe navigation is really an essential tool for keeping your drivers safe.”

“The map is an essential piece of a navigation routing tool, and we focus very highly on a truck-safe, truck-legal and truck-specific map. We have a very large team of GIS [geographic information system] engineers that are constantly editing the maps on a daily basis. We are also using AI and machine learning to look at various things in the road — stuff like the curvature of a turn and whether or not a truck can safely take that curvature of a turn [to determine if we would] suggest that route or not.”

“At Trimble we produce our own map data, and we do that because, again, there’s an essential link between the map data and the navigation system. We’re highly focused on commercial routes; we’ve been doing this for over 40 years on the PC*Miler product and over 30 years in our navigation products. … We also have millions of locations that trucks go so that we can provide safe and efficient mile routing into and out of those truck-specific locations.”

“It’s all about providing a safer experience for our drivers and giving them tools that are built specifically for them to keep them safe while they’re out on the road.”