Dry van and refrigerated trailers will evolve over the next 10 years to become more connected, lighter, more durable and more aerodynamic than today’s equipment, executives at major trailer manufacturers said.

Advances in tracking technology are enabling fleets to better assess driver performance and fairly reward them for fuel-efficient driving.

The rapid expansion of onboard technology — electronic logging devices, telematics systems and in-cab video — brings with it the challenge of servicing this equipment. Ensuring that repairs are handled quickly is essential to maximizing utilization and staying compliant with the ELD mandate.

The work of servicing and maintaining a fleet of trucks presents a wide assortment of potential dangers to technicians, but the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s “lockout-tagout” regulations provide guidance to reduce the risk of injury or death.

Tolls can cause administrative headaches and bring additional costs to trucking companies, but toll-management providers are offering services that could help alleviate both burdens.

The Department of Energy’s SuperTruck project is producing technological changes, including to auxiliary power units, and these changes will be working their way into standard truck manufacturing, according to industry experts.

Auxiliary power units allow truck drivers to have climate control for their sleepers and electricity for hotel loads without needing to idle the tractor engine, but fleets that elect to add APUs to the cab must decide how those APUs will be powered — by a small diesel engine or by batteries.

The less-than-truckload industry is embracing dimensioning technology to enable more accurate freight pricing and automate what used to be manual tasks.

The use of dimensioners is expanding in the less-than-­truckload industry, enabling carriers to more accurately calcu­late shipment density.

The popularity of the Android platform with consumer mobile devices has spread to industrial mobile computing.