AI-powered automotive solutions provider Viaduct announced a multiyear agreement Tuesday with global trucking manufacturer Paccar to integrate data between Peterbilt and Kenworth trucks and Viaduct’s connected vehicle data platform to improve vehicle uptime.
In an interview with FreightWaves, the founder and CEO of Viaduct, David Hallac, described the company’s growing relationship with Paccar and other OEMs to solve major issues for the fleets they sell to.
“We started with Paccar almost two years ago and slowly began expanding our relationship with them and the number of vehicles we were helping them analyze,” said Hallac. “Now we are working to avoid truck downtime and costly road failures. Where our technology has been the most useful is identifying the highest-risk vehicles so we can pull them off the road and begin to optimize service schedules around those issues.”
Hallac added that one of the major key performance indicators that Viaduct is monitoring is Paccar customer downtime for both planned and unplanned maintenance.
“We may not be directly getting more drivers on the road, but we are going to make sure the drivers who are out there are being as productive as possible and [can] be certain that the vehicles they are in are staying healthy over a longer period of time than those initial first few years,” he said.
Using a comprehensive data model that digests all connectivity data, service data and manufacturing data, Hallac and his team have built comprehensive pictures of individual vehicles, giving OEMs deeper insight into every vehicle coming out of their facilities.
That execution strategy combined with Viaduct’s services — Smart Service and Smart Quality — means the company can begin to make predictions to avoid unexpected maintenance for fleets.
“Smart Services is focused on optimizing service schedules around regular maintenance for fleets through integration into connectivity offerings. Smart Quality is more focused towards the OEM and is useful through its core KPIs, which help minimize cost of quality, reduce warranty costs, and reduce time to identify and fix systematic quality issues,” said Hallac.
Using these services, Hallac said Viaduct has been able to catch systematic issues three to six months sooner, allowing OEMs like Paccar to fix all sorts of truck issues that otherwise might plague them for years.
This is particularly important as OEMs continue to experience high levels of vehicle recalls, reaching 35 million in 2018 and 53 million in 2019.
“The real reason we have been able to help is that a lot of these issues won’t show up in pre-production OEM testing. If you are doing it on 10 vehicles, those 10 vehicles might have been done perfectly. Maybe in those first 30,000 miles there are no issues, but we are able to find that later-life failure that occurs in one out of every 100 vehicles. That might not seem like a lot, but for a company with a large fleet, that could be a handful of poor-quality vehicles on the road,” said Hallac.
Hallac explained Viaduct is excited to continue building off the partnership with Paccar and continue helping automotive OEMs use their data to impact their overall operations and safety initiatives.
“One of the things we have realized, and is a big benefit to us, is we are an automotive solutions company. We are not trying to sell the same solutions to financial institutions or airlines; we have partnered exclusively in the automotive space, and we are bringing custom solutions that we have spent many years developing to improve the auto space,” said Hallac.
Watch now: Viaduct announces new partnership with Paccar
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Viaduct uses connected vehicle data to help OEMs