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A key strategy to improving the real-world fuel consumption and emissions of medium and heavy duty vehicles is the hybridization of these applications. Unlike the passenger vehicle market, medium and heavy duty applications are typically comprised of a range of components from a variety of manufacturers. The vocational market diversity and size places considerable demand on fuel efficiency and emission compliance. Medium and heavy duty applications have the ability to be successfully hybridized in ways that are not currently, or would not be practical within a passenger vehicle. This would also drive greater truck and bus vertical integration of the hybrid components. However, medium and heavy duty manufacturers have been prevented from certifying a full vehicle level platform due to the current engine only certification requirements.

The development of commercial vehicles demand a rigorous and relatively expedient integration and validation to be performed in order to have the vehicle delivered to a satisfied customer. In today's market, the end customer often request for vehicles with various customizations and requirements for vocational performance, such as load and fuel economy. These requirements often run into conflict with vehicle dynamics fundamentals such as ride and handling. Examples of such concern are vocation bodies that do not have weight distributed unevenly or even ones that bias the static load distribution of the vehicle such that ride and handling are affected because of change in bounce, roll and pitch natural frequencies. One tool that can be used to develop and evaluate vehicle response to provide guidance for production vehicles is multibody dynamics. Unlike the passenger car industry, no two trucks rolling down the assembly line are necessarily the same.

Provision of service information in various languages has been a must in the automotive industry. However, in the commercial vehicle industry, it is unclear how manufacturers are managing this daunting task. California Air Resource Board (CARB) 2010 regulations are awakening the commercial vehicle service information managers who are responsible for providing this information according to SAE J2403 terminology. Now is the time to mimic the automotive industry by collaborating on terminology, and in the meantime, begin discussion on how we all manage multiple languages.