U.S. Xpress Equipping Entire Fleet with ALK’s CoPilot Truck

ALK Technologies said U.S. Xpress Inc. will deploy ALK’s CoPilot Truck GPS navigation system across its entire fleet of more than 5,000 power units, becoming the largest major motor carrier to provide its drivers with spoken, truck-specific, turn-by-turn directions.

Demonstrations of CoPilot Truck are available at ALK’s booth 1104, during the American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference and Exhibition in Dallas, Texas, this Sunday through next Tuesday.
U.S. Xpress, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, recently decided to adopt CoPilot Truck company-wide.
CoPilot Truck is a comprehensive solution that gets drivers where they need to go while avoiding restricted roads, tunnels and bridges. This eases the frequently intense hassle of driving a large truck in unfamiliar territory. CoPilot Truck provides confidence for new drivers and peace of mind for veteran drivers who are now always aware of exactly where they are and how far it is to their next turn and destination.
CoPilot Truck combines ALK’s PC*MILER 20 routing and mapping with the real-time precision of GPS navigation to guide drivers turn by turn to virtually any street-level address in the U.S. and Canada. A driver is alerted to upcoming turns by voice from the speaker of the truck’s in-cab device. CoPilot Truck guides drivers around roads, bridges and tunnels with truck restrictions.
The ability of CoPilot Truck to automatically recalculate routes based on dynamic factors such as traffic, construction or accidents is a key benefit for drivers and carriers.
“Drivers should not have to stop to look at an atlas and redirect themselves,” said Jeff Seibenhener, vice president information technology for U.S. Xpress. “If they actually do get off route, for whatever reason, CoPilot Truck will determine a new route for the driver. Basically it should never allow them to get lost.”
Seibenhener said that U.S. Xpress staff personnel tested CoPilot extensively on business and personal trips before installing the application on company trucks. “We tried to get lost,” he said, “but so far no one has been able to.”
U.S. Xpress selected the ALK application for a number of reasons, including the fact that CoPilot Truck data resides on the onboard device. That differs from a competing system that delivers driving directions to the truck cab from the provider’s remote server.
“Competing systems require that whenever you want to detour or reroute, you incur the cost of the communication back to the host application,” Seibenhener said. “We felt CoPilot Truck’s more dynamic and cost effective functionality was a better fit for us.”
Also in contrast to the competition, ALK offers a CoPilot Truck software development kit that enables U.S. Xpress to customize views and functionality of CoPilot Truck. For example, points of interest including truckstops and tourist attractions are available in the CoPilot Truck database; but they can be blocked if the company so desires.
U.S. Xpress also has the ability to control CoPilot Truck options wirelessly. “We can automatically configure CoPilot on the truck remotely. When we haul a hazmat load, we can turn on hazmat routing on the fly. The same thing is possible with routing for high value products,” Seibenhener said.