How 'listening' to your truck can help catch component failure

“Ken, if you listen to your truck, it will talk to you,” he said.

Being younger and in a naïve stage of life when everything seemed literal, I concluded these “magical trucks” must have some previously unknown animal properties. Or perhaps advanced new 1970’s technology, just like the popular video game PONG. But Roy wasn’t finished yet. 

“Every machine, every mechanical device, has its own personality,” he insisted. “My truck will make predictable sounds and vibrations when in good health, and if I develop a bad wheel bearing, a driveline out of balance, a dead fuel injector, my truck tries to talk to me, it tries to tell me something is wrong—but only if I’m listening.”

As the years have rolled forward, I’ve come to understand the genius in the simple words he spoke. Certainly, many things seem to have changed from the ‘70s to today, but have they changed completely? 

Today in truckling, we are in an era of acoustic glass, subwoofer stereos, climate-controlled environments, sound-deadening cab insulation, and air-ride road suspensions. Diesel engine noise has decreased since the mid-1990s by 10 to 20 decibels—a factor of two- to four-fold—through advancement in electronically controlled engines, common rail fuel systems, turbochargers, and exhaust gas recirculation. As proof we’ve made progress, we are no longer required to shut off the diesel pickup truck while waiting in the McDonalds’ drive-through. Everything in trucks has been redesigned to improve the driving experience and lower fatigue, and soon, with zero-emission powertrain technology on the near horizon, our world is about to get even quieter.

This progression isn’t a bad one, but with it, how on earth do we listen to our trucks? How can we reduce our maintenance costs, out-of-service time, and decrease our unscheduled breakdowns, when everything is designed to take away audible warning signs of a developing problem? 

Perhaps we adapt. Perhaps we learn to listen with our eyes. In other words, we listen through data.

At approximately the same time Seinfeld became a hit TV show in the mid 1990s, the J1708 diagnostic port started showing up on heavy-duty trucks, providing an early window into what was really going on under the hood. A few years later, the J1708 protocol was replaced by its much faster cousin, the J1939 data port. 

This data window allowed a truck to “talk” about its problems via the Onboard Diagnostic System, commonly referred to as OBD. This electronic system constantly monitors various components of the truck, including the engine, transmission, and exhaust system. But when the OBD detects an issue, it may not produce a visual or audible cue to the driver; instead, it may simply store diagnostic trouble codes (DTCs) and be prepared to communicate those DTCs across the J1939 data port.  

By following an electronic data trail from the J1939 port, service technicians can efficiently diagnose and repair a vehicle fault condition. This electronic window into a vehicle’s current health and history sets the stage for an accurate diagnosis of the problem and successful completion of repair. However, this approach also means your truck has likely been placed out of service, out of revenue miles, parked at a service facility, and must be physically connected by data cable to a technician’s laptop computer.  

There may be a better way. 

First, let’s unpack how a truck breaks down. Certainly, there are critical events whereby a powertrain component will suddenly fail without warning. But this is not the norm. In many cases, well before an actual failure event, such as an engine derate or transmission shift failure, warning signals are clearly present. These warning signals can be seen across the J1939 data port, but not heard inside the cab.   

It works like this. Many components in their early stage of failure will communicate, by way of onboard electronic vehicle sensor, an intermittent performance characteristic just outside of normal operating range, such as an intermittent pressure drop, a brief temperature increase, or a temporary voltage or current resistance anomaly. Then the component sensor will return to its normal reporting range. 

As the component failure continues to worsen and develop over time, it is typical to see that worsening condition matched with an acceleration of those intermittent, out-of-range sensor values reported through on-board diagnostics information. But while the driver is unaware of any problem, the J1939 data port is listening and ready to report important news that trouble lies just ahead.  

Today we have exciting new methods and solutions to help keep our trucks rolling. Many heavy-duty vehicle manufacturers have the option to provide their customers with remote diagnostics and vehicle performance information — information that can be communicated across the J1939 data network via telematics hardware and vehicle cellular connection to a central data hub. Once this live vehicle sensor data is off the truck and routed to a data center, there are many options for what can happen next. Critical vehicle fault data can be relayed to a fleet’s private web portal connection, a driver’s mobile device, or to a monitoring service that may distill, aggregate, and report on vehicle fault code information.  

On the surface, digital vehicle health data may seem overwhelming to fleets. Many normal vehicle operating conditions can produce something that masquerades as a fault, when in fact everything is working as it should, like a low-oil-pressure fault observed at engine start. The point here is there are nuggets of critically important vehicle diagnostic data contained within the overall picture of all data recorded after engine key-on.    

This takes me back to Roy, back to his assertion that if you listen to your truck, it will talk to you. 

Today, many fleets and owner-operators alike may choose to decline the optional data/diagnostic offering from their OEM. I get it, our email inboxes are already flooded with messages; we all just want to say no to receiving more messages. But these messages may be our trucks trying to talk to us.

Fleets that embrace and incorporate telematics and diagnostic warning signs into their daily operation stand to reduce their overall downtime, the likelihood of progressive component damage, and reduce their total cost of ownership. Tomorrow, with AI making rapid advancement on all fronts, the future looks bright for further technological improvements to distill diagnostic sensor data into actionable and predictable next repair steps.    

Yes, the days of repair diagnosis by way of rumbling, vibrating, and smoking clues may have passed us by. But tomorrow’s careful fleet listener will embrace the digital noise of onboard sensor data and become fluent in the new language of vehicle diagnostics.  
Certainly, our shared goal to reduce vehicle maintenance cost has not changed over the decades, but perhaps the way we listen to the talking truck has.