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Jon Morrison (Phillips Connect)

Smart-trailer product developer Phillips Connect announced that former Wabco Americas president Jon Morrison will serve as a strategic executive to the company as it looks to increase its market share in trailer connectivity and support a future with autonomous vehicles.

Phillips Connect, based in Newport Beach, Calif., said it will draw on Morrison’s extensive experience in electronic vehicle control, electrification, vehicle telematics and advanced technologies. Morrison is now CEO of J&M Strategic Insights.

“We are aggressively moving to realizing our vision,” said Rob Phillips, founder and CEO of Phillips Connect, during a virtual media day presentation May 18. “We are faster than others because we don’t have to train our team on what trucks and trailers are, about how fleets operate. Our wheelhouse is wire, cable and connectors. And we have already expanded that significantly. Our strategy has been to work with the best suppliers in the industry to be that integration hub between all that data that is coming in.”

We are extremely fortunate to have someone of Jon’s caliber join our team! Jon joins the team as Strategic Executive guiding Phillips Connect ahead as we significantly grow our market share in smart trailer solutions.

Full press release:

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— Phillips Connect (@phillips_conn)

Cameras are one area the company is “very deep into,” and there is a lot of industry need right now for cargo cameras, said Jim Epler, general manager of Phillips Connect. The company has tested several.

“We have to develop our own camera that does things a little bit differently than what’s out there now,” Epler said. “With our platform, the ease of installation, the price points that we have to meet, and considering all the other sensor data in there, we can’t have one camera that eats up so much of that budget.”

As for the role of trailers in a world of autonomous trucks, Epler said they were laying groundwork there, as well. Phase one is making sure the driver has access to the data about what is going on with the trailer, he said.

“We can have this as a wired or wireless connection,” he said. “When it comes to autonomous, we don’t have a driver. So all of the health data needs to be transmitted through our trailer and our harnessing right into that tractor so it knows what is going on in the trailer. Obviously, it’s super important that you don’t go down the road [autonomously] with issues happening in your trailer.”

Rob Phillips by Phillips Connect

Phillips noted that his company is also working on backup cameras, and is addressing some technical challenges it has encountered.

“There is a thing called latency [a measure of delay], which is a challenge,” he said. “So we are developing special harnessing that allows you to reduce and almost eliminate all that latency. I think that is going to be a really good product for us.”

Phillips said now is an exciting time to be working with technology.

“I think the reality is autonomous trucks don’t work without a smart trailer and the platform we have is the only platform out there that can handle this,” he said. “I really do think we are laying the groundwork for autonomous.”

Phillips Connect is a stand-alone company within Phillips Technologies Group. It has developed open-system platforms that consolidate smart components onto one central hub, using one data plan to deliver actionable alerts to the driver, and customizable fleet management dashboards to the fleet’s operations or dispatch teams.

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