For heavy-duty trucking fleets trying to squeeze more uptime out of their equipment, batteries rarely get much attention — until they fail. And when they fail on a trailer, it’s almost always at the worst possible moment: at a customer dock, with a liftgate that won’t move.

That’s the problem Clarios is aiming to solve with a new trailer battery health management system unveiled this week, building on the company’s broader push into connected services for commercial vehicle fleets.

Speaking with trucking media at the CES electronics show in Las Vegas, Cagatay Topcu, vice president of the Connected Services Business Unit at Clarios, described the trailer solution as a natural extension of the company’s battery monitoring platform — one that was driven directly by fleet demand.

“We are focusing on heavy-duty and on fleets,” Topcu said. “We’ve been installing our sensors and gateways to get very high-quality data, and we’ve developed a lot of confidence in our algorithms using AI and machine learning.”

Finding the Source of Trailer Battery Failures

That confidence, he said, has allowed Clarios to expand beyond tractors and into one of the least-monitored assets in a fleet: the trailer.

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The idea for the trailer application came from a customer conversation. During a meeting about Clarios’ Battery Manager product, which monitors battery health and predicts failures, a fleet manager asked a simple question: Can you help us with our trailer batteries?

Clarios responded quickly, installing sensors and gateways on the trailers within a week. Within a few weeks of monitoring, the problem became clear.

The trailers were equipped with liftgates, powered by high-draw electric motors that require dedicated batteries. And those batteries were failing for two predictable reasons.

• Drivers sometimes were pulling trailers without connecting the power cord to the tractor, leaving the batteries to drain. 

• Trailers were sitting idle in yards for extended periods, allowing batteries to deep-discharge and suffer permanent damage.

Both issues, Topcu said, are easy to identify once fleets have visibility into battery state of charge.

“In the first case, we notify the driver,” he explained. “You pulled the trailer, it’s not connected, and the state of charge is low. The driver pulls over, makes the connection, and the problem is solved before they ever reach the customer.”

In the second case, the alert goes to the yard manager.

“Tell me which trailers have low battery state of charge,” Topcu said. “We give them the GPS location so they can find and charge them.”

Delivering Actionable Insights

The result is fewer liftgate failures at customer sites, fewer service calls, and fewer unnecessary battery replacements, each of which can cost fleets $700 to $900 for a pair of trailer batteries.

More importantly, Topcu said, the value comes from delivering actionable insight to the right person at the right time.

“You can have the best algorithm in the world,” he said. “But if you don’t change behavior, you don’t create value.”

That’s why Clarios is emphasizing flexible delivery of alerts and insights via mobile devices, dashboards, or direct integration into fleet maintenance software through APIs.

While the trailer solution uses the same sensors, gateways, and analytics as Clarios’ tractor-focused offering, Topcu said it highlights a broader strategic shift for the company: expanding its connected services portfolio by applying proven algorithms to new data sources and new use cases.

For fleets, the appeal is straightforward. Trailer batteries may be a small line item individually, but failures create outsized disruption. By catching problems early — and by preventing them altogether — Clarios believes it can eliminate a quiet but costly source of downtime.

And judging by early fleet interest, it’s a problem plenty of operators are ready to fix.

Related: Are Dead Batteries About to Die Forever?