Head to head
Truck navigation solves a real and difficult problem, and a fleet without it will eventually put a trailer under a bridge. It is simply not the tool that stops an overweight axle.
Who it is for
Truck navigation exists because a route planned for a car will cheerfully send a 13-foot-6 trailer under a 12-foot structure.
A truck navigation product holds a vehicle profile — height, width, length, weight, sometimes hazardous cargo class — and plans around the structures and streets that profile is not allowed on. Then it does the harder half: it guides a driver through it, in real time, with traffic, at four in the morning, in weather.
The good ones add everything else the cab needs. Truck parking with availability, fuel prices along the route, rest areas, weigh station locations, low-clearance warnings and lane guidance at the junctions that catch people out. This is a mature category and the products in it are genuinely good.
None of that is in dispute here. If your fleet has had a bridge strike, a mirror clipped on a residential street or a driver stuck on a road they should never have turned into, buy the navigation product. It will pay for itself and this page is not arguing with it.
A navigation product has never been shown the pallets. It cannot be wrong about them, and it cannot be right about them either.
The two questions
Can this truck take this road? Navigation answers that, well.
Is this load legal on any road? Nothing in a navigation product answers that, because nothing in it has ever seen the pallets.
The job it was not built for
Every truck navigation product treats the vehicle description as an input. It is your responsibility, it is taken on trust, and it is almost always a gross figure.
The profile carries a gross weight. Enforcement measures the steer, the drives and the trailer group, applies the bridge formula to every consecutive combination, then checks the tires and the axle ratings. A load can pass the profile and fail four of those.
Two identical 46,000 lb loads, one built nose-first and one built evenly, produce completely different axle weights and identical navigation profiles. The route will be the same. The scale ticket will not.
When the drives are over, what a yard needs is an instruction: move the tandems back four holes. A navigation product has no model of the freight, so it has nothing to compute that from.
1,600 lb over
A worked example. Same freight, same total weight, same tractor and trailer, same vehicle profile. The route a navigation product returns is identical for both, and one of them is over on the drives.
The vehicle profile carries height, width, length and a gross weight. Both of those builds produce the same profile, so both get the same road. Only one of them gets through the scale house on it.
Side by side
Voice guidance, live traffic and parking data are navigation jobs. We do not do them, and a fleet needs somebody who does.
The whole routing category| Capability | AxleGuard | Truck navigation | Consumer navigation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Route respects vehicle height, width and length | Yes | Yes | No |
| Route respects gross vehicle weight | Yes | Yes | No |
| Turn-by-turn voice guidance in the cab | No | Yes | Yes |
| Truck parking, fuel and weigh station points of interest | part | Yes | part |
| Live traffic and re-routing | No | Yes | Yes |
| Warning when a restriction had to be relaxed | Yes | n/p | No |
| Axle weights solved from where the freight sits | Yes | No | No |
| Bridge formula on every consecutive axle group | Yes | No | No |
| Tire and axle-rating limits layered on statute | Yes | No | No |
| Corrective move in slider holes and inches | Yes | No | No |
| Verdict recomputed per leg as freight comes off | Yes | No | No |
| Jurisdiction rule set attached to the load | Yes | n/p | No |
Methodology
When to pick them instead
Your problem is drivers getting lost, taking wrong turns or hitting low structures. That is a navigation problem and a navigation product fixes it.
You need voice guidance, lane assistance and live traffic in the cab. We do not do turn-by-turn and are not planning to.
You need truck parking, fuel prices and rest area data on the road ahead. That belongs to the navigation vendors and they are good at it.
Your fleet runs one fixed configuration with a fixed, evenly distributed commodity, and has never had an axle-weight citation.
Working together
The load is solved at the dock. The road is planned around the real equipment. The cab keeps the navigation it already trusts.
Freight positions, equipment geometry and the jurisdictions on the route go in. Five axle numbers and a verdict come out, before anything is lifted.
If the load is over, the correction is issued in the units the yard uses. If nothing works, it goes down the permit pathway instead of being routed anyway.
Height, length, width and weight from the tractor and trailer on file, with anything relaxed said out loud rather than quietly ignored.
The device in the cab keeps doing the turn-by-turn, the traffic and the parking. Nothing about the driver's day changes.
Related
Category
Routing and navigation
Five platforms that hold the road data, side by side.
ReadHead to head
vs Trimble MAPS
Mileage of record and in-cab navigation from one house.
ReadHead to head
vs HERE truck routing
A commercial vehicle network, and the input it waits for.
ReadCompare
The full matrix
Twenty-four rows across six categories.
ReadNext step
Same truck, same road, same freight. We will solve the axles for it and you will find out in forty-five minutes whether the road was ever the problem.