With the trucking industry constantly changing, the aftermarket truck parts and service industry must change, too. Highlighting the changes and the current and future opportunities for parts and services shops was Derek Kaufman, managing partner, Schwartz Advisors and president of C3 Network LLC.
“Trucking safety is a huge area of opportunity here,” says Kaufman, who led off a series of presentations Monday, Jan 22, at Service Opportunity Learning Days (SOLD), which preceded Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week (HDAW) 2018 in Las Vegas. “Lane-keeping and forward-collision [features] are big in trucking and will continue to be. More and more, you’re seeing suppliers enter this market.”
Kaufman says the technology for forward collision avoidance can be a simple warning that the driver is getting to close. However, forward collision avoidance can include active control that slows the truck or brings it to a complete stop. He adds that National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration (NHTSA) is looking at this very closely.
“[NHTSA] believes, as it looks at truck crashes, that there’s a very high percentage of rear-end collisions with cars, and they believe this could be a major thing for safety in the United States,” Kaufman says. “We anticipate them mandating this. We also think this is a service opportunity because this technology can be put on a three-year-old truck.”
Another opportunity for truck service providers is the cleaning and replacement of aftermarket diesel particulate filters (DPFs). An entire industry has built up around cleaning and replacing DPFs, according to Kaufman. “Truck dealers buying cleaning stations, specialty companies forming to focus solely on DPF, it’s a real market opportunity. For $8,500 you can get a very good piece of DPF cleaning equipment,” he says.
Kaufman also pointed to the substantially increased number of trucks that require a jumpstart because so many electrical parts have been added to the vehicles. These parts are drawing off the battery and the alternator systems simply are not keeping up. The result is a rise in the use of stacks of ultra-capacitors, which are a battery system more about power rather than long energy. Ultra-capacitors provide that power to turn the engine over.
“The idea is you place the ultra-capacitor in your battery box, replacing one of the batteries … and that ultra-capacitor is strictly used to start the engine and protect the other batteries from degradation,” Kaufman says. “We think this is a new area in the industry and will be on the uptick in the next three to five years. It’s a great aftermarket opportunity because it’s a quick swap.”
