THE RISE OF INNOVATION AT MAN TRUCK & BUS: NEW CABS PRIORITIZE THE DRIVER’S CONVENIENCE

For truck drivers, it is essential to combine comfort with convenience at work. This doesn’t have to be complicated and could include a change as innocuous as the location of the emergency brake, a mechanism that has evolved over the years and is now located very close to the steering wheel in MAN trucks.?

?While brainstorming over innovation, developers at MAN Truck & Bus prioritized drivers’ needs and tried to understand what it’s really like to spend long hours behind the wheel. They didn’t want to get swayed by older truck models and were more interested in making things easier and more convenient for truck drivers — Dr. Britta Michel, the former innovation advisor and Head of the Central HMI Research Department said in 2020 that her team made sure to directly involve many truck drivers at an early stage and asked them about their ideal work setting, a move that was rewarding in more ways than one. Dr. Michel said, “We were able to start from scratch, question everything, recreate everything. It’s not often you’re given such an opportunity.”

The entire team dedicated 10 years to the project and worked with nearly 1,000 truck drivers while doing test runs with the redesigned trucks and incorporated their feedback into the final product. What changed? There was more room inside the trucks for drivers thanks to the absence of the center console and other significant improvements: For instance, the gear selector lever’s movements were designed to mimic hand movements and drivers now had access to automated driving programs with high-quality graphic display screens.

The development team at MAN Truck & Bus also focused on modifying the controls in ways that made it fairly easy for drivers to use them without changing their positions. Safety was another crucial part of the process — the driving time assistant would help drivers in calculating the maximum driving time and the new operating tools would ensure that drivers didn’t have to manually switch on the hazard lights or get into the cab to tweak the maneuvering lights. The traditional hazard lights were replaced by LED warning lights and “an acoustic warning tone” would alert drivers if pedestrians were close by.

The team worked on minute details by viewing the situation from the perspective of a truck driver — For example, when they replaced levers with buttons that stayed in their original positions after operation, they ensured that the driver could still tell that the function had been modified at the time of manual operation by including pressure points.

?The process was arduous but worth the effort and truck drivers played a direct role in workshops that gave them a chance to voice their concerns. The development team also visited truck drivers and interacted with them, examining the ingenious solutions that they came up with inside their cockpits to cope with common issues. This was important to the development team and Dr. Michel justified their decisions with a simple statement, “Because it is they, not us, who are sitting in the driver’s seat for hours on end.”

?What is your take on modern-day trucks and what kind of changes would you like to see in the near future? Is there any innovative tool that has particularly impressed you or taken you by surprise? Tell us more in the comments below.