A powered auxiliary axle for road tractors from Hyliion has won the 2018 Jim Winsor Memorial Technical Achievement Award, the awards committee has announced.

Called 6x4HE, the fuel-saving electric drive-axle system was selected from five finalists by an ad hoc group of industry editors writers. The award was presented during the recent Technology & Maintenance Council Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Ga.

Heavy Duty Trucking Equipment Editor Jim Park chairs the 12-member award committee and HDT Senior Editor Jack Roberts and Senior Contributing Editor Tom Berg are also members.

The award is named in honor of the late Jim Winsor, whose journalism career spanned more than 50 years in service to the trucking industry. Winsor worked his way through college by driving cargo trucks and then served in the U.S. Army as a Transportation Corps lieutenant. He was active with the Truck Maintenance Committee, forerunner to today’s TMC. Winsor passed away in 2015 at age 81, about 10 years after retiring as Executive Editor of HDT.

To be eligible for the Jim Winsor Memorial Technical Achievement Award, a product or service has to show technical innovation, have a wide applicability and availability in trucking, and offer significant benefits.

The Hyliion electric axle, when added to a truck or tractor, acts as a hybrid system, capturing braking energy and converting it to electricity, then uses that energy to help launch the vehicle and propel it up hills. This relieves the engine of some of its usual work, saving fuel. It also reduces wear on service brakes.

The 6x4HE, consisting of an axle, a motor-generator, a lithium-ion battery pack, and electronic controls, can replace the second axle in a “live” tandem or be added to a 6x2 tandem to effectively turn the truck into a 6x4.

“With all the great innovations in trucking this year, we are honored to have been awarded the Jim Winsor Memorial Technical Achievement Award," said Thomas Healy, founder and CEO of Hyliion. "Hyliion is focused on delivering products that are easy to adopt, deliver a significant profit improvement to the trucking industry and improve the environment. The Hyliion 6X4HE is our first.”

The four other finalists for the award were:

• Eaton Cummins Automated Transmission Technologies’ Endurant self-shifting transmission

• Truck-lite Road Ready trailer monitoring and telematics system

• Volvo’s LED headlamps, which feature a reverse-flow fan to defrost the lens in winter conditions

• XStream TruckWings auto-deploy trailer gap system

Award committee chair Park noted that "2017 was a banner year for innovation and imagination in new product development. We began deliberations with 22 new products, the longest list in the history of the award. Through many hundreds of emails and dozens of phone calls we managed to get the list down to just five. This is an exciting time to be writing about trucks, trucking and trucking technology."