Wabco Holdings Inc. has reached an agreement to provide its advanced emergency braking system to Altec, a provider of products and services to the electric utility, telecommunications, tree care, lights and signs, and contractor markets, for its medium-duty trucks.

Wabco, a leading global supplier of technologies that improve the safety, efficiency and connectivity of commercial vehicles, will supply Altec with its OnGuardACTIVE technology, a radar-based active safety system that offers collision mitigation and adaptive cruise control (ACC).

Altec is among the first Truck Equipment Manufacturers (TEM) to offer medium-duty vocational trucks equipped with OnGuardACTIVE in the United States.

Wabco and Altec collaborated on integration of the OnGuardACTIVE system to create customized front bumper designs (for example, those incorporating a recovery winch), a common requirement of customers in the industries Altec serves. These installations comply with Wabco’s factory performance criteria and calibration, a significant value this collaboration provides to customers.

By providing audible, visual and haptic warnings, OnGuardACTIVE detects moving, stopped or stationary vehicles ahead and measures the vehicle’s position in relation to others to warn and alert the driver of a potential rear-end collision. When necessary, the system will apply the brakes to help avoid or mitigate a collision.

“This agreement with Altec is another major milestone for Wabco, bringing active braking to a truck equipment manufacturer in the medium-duty market,” said Jon Morrison, Wabco president, Americas. “OnGuardACTIVE is well-established in the heavy-duty truck market. We’re excited to help provide that same technology on vocational trucks, where it will help improve safety and reduce downtime.”

WABCO has been a leader in the development of Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) technology since it introduced forward safety with OnGuard in 2008. OnGuardACTIVE, already well-established in the heavy-duty truck market with more than 500,000 units sold globally, has helped reduce rear-end collisions in heavy-duty trucks equipped with the technology by as much as 87%. It also has improved accident-related uptime by 19%.

“Active braking, which is central to OnGuardACTIVE, is one of the core competencies of vehicle dynamic control (VDC),” Morrison said. “Bringing active braking to the medium-duty truck market is another vital step in our ongoing strategy to enable the commercial vehicle industry’s vision of autonomous driving.”

Wabco is a developer of many different commercial vehicle safety technologies. With its active braking and active steering technologies, Wabco provides full dynamic control – lateral and longitudinal – for commercial vehicles, which is necessary for platooning and autonomous driving. In addition to active braking and lane-keeping assistance, Wabco offers an array of other Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) technologies that increase safety for the vehicle and its occupants, as well as other vehicles and people around them.