No more bronco-busting, pothole-diving events in your cab.
By Advance Business Capital
Bose Now Makes Truck Seats
(No, this is not an Onion headline.)

            

Stardate: January 27, 2010.
Location: Earth, Framingham, Massachusetts, USA.

Today Bose, the high-end audio equipment maker, unveiled its daring entry into the transportation industry. No, not as you might expect, with some splashy speaker system, but the coolest piece of vehicle furniture this side of the captain’s chair on the Starship Enterprise, a truck seat whose “high-power linear electromagnetic actuator” should dramatically reduce driver fatigue and back injury.

High End, High Stakes Gamble
Bose’s market: OTR truck fleets. Market size: 3 million vehicles. Unit cost: “upper four figures” or as CEO Bob Maresca coyly put it, “well under $10,000.” For comparison, rival Bostrom’s current state-of-the-art Air-Ride goes for under $2,000. Since Bose isn’t known for value pricing, you can bet the “Bose Ride,” as its called, will make everyone else’s product look like a WalMart close-out.

But will fleet owners pay, especially in this market? Bose gambles they will. The industry spends $68 billion a year on driver health-care problems and consequent employee turnover. Mike Rosen, Bose’s chief R&D engineer and head of its auto group, cited Labor Department stats showing back pain plus head and neck tension affect more than half of America’s truckers. And of course the road risk that comes with driver fatigue is another big incentive.

Bose’s day-long press event included the company’s usual copious white-page documentation, including results of a four-week, 77-person field test and, for drama, a side-by-side comparison of the Bose Ride with a conventional Class 8 seat. Two sturdy truckers climbed into a simulator housed in a Bose highway truck box, locked belts in their respective seats and were then jounced and jostled in a show that looked like an astronaut audition. During the ride, Rosen explained in detail why Driver One was apparently shattering vertebrae while Driver Two looked like he was cruising in a Laz-E-Boy.

Meanwhile in Another Galaxy…
All in all, a helluva product rollout. Even veteran trucking journalists were impressed, as were reporters from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.  Videos and articles poured out.

Nobody noticed.

Because the same day, on the other side of the country in San Francisco, master showman Steve Jobs was demonstrating Apple’s latest miracle tool: the iPad. Nobody dazzles like Jobs. Even Bose founder Amar Bose may have been forgiven for watching.

Bad luck! But then Bose is aiming at fleet owners and not fickle electronics consumers. So on to the part that interests you, at least if you’re a trucker. How does it work? Bose’s press kit includes a tech-heavy explanation for MIT grads and a dumbed-down version for those of us who are not. We’ll draw from both, trying to do service to the technology’s sophistication without getting it wrong. Here goes:

Simple Results, Complicated Explanation
Conventional air-ride seat suspensions offer some isolation from road shocks and vibrations, but involve tradeoffs that still can’t fully protect drivers from regular vibration, much less sharp inputs like potholes. They’re essentially “passive” devices that respond to road surface. The Bose Ride is an “active” device that acts so fast it essentially anticipates road surface.

According to Jim Parison, the project’s lead engineer, the Bose Ride uses electromagnetic actuators, high-power amplifiers and control algorithms to actively negate road vibrations. The technology is, in other words, a super-tech shock absorber, but with an electromagnetic piston that raises and lowers the driver’s seat in response to sensors that feel bumps, potholes and washboard roads through the truck floor. The system is designed to keep the driver’s head and torso level, even when the truck isn’t. (Drivers still feel the road through the steering wheel and the foot pedals.)

The result? The drive cab may bounce and swerve with the truck, but the driver stays steady. The commonplace body shudder part of every trucker’s driving experience is drastically minimized.

Made Where?
In another innovational twist, the Bose Ride will not be made in China, but manufactured at the company’s Framingham facility near Boston. Production will start in late March and be initially available on a build-to-order basis for volume fleet purchases. Eventually, however, units will be sold to independent owner-operators, provided they pay shipping costs.

Bose will also provide fleet customers with installation training. The seat and base can be installed in most heavy-duty trucks in approximately two hours using conventional seat bolts, air line and a 12V power connection, although it needs an additional storage battery. The Bose Ride uses up to 3,500 watts, but is primarily self-perpetuating, only drawing from the truck about the power needed for a 50-watt bulb.

Another Eon, Another Product
Intact vertebrae in exchange for the energy demands of an ordinary light bulb? Now that’s green-thinking. For Bose Inc, it comes at the price of huge investments in time and money. Fortunately, Amar Bose owns the company—at least most of its privately-held stock—or the need for quarterly gains would have prevented it from doing something like this. (Its famous noise-canceling headphones took years to catch on.) Bose says he likes to take on products that “will turn out in their own time,” and develop the market later. Until he retired in 2000, Bose’s day gig was teaching at MIT. This sounds a little self-servingly naïve even for a college prof, but clearly Bose Inc has a refreshing corporate strategy of creating the product before the campaign.

As illustration, the super-ergo seat project that is Bose Ride began ten years ago, spun off from another more ambitious (and yet unrealized) auto-body suspension project begun in 1994, which in turn was prompted by the founder’s 1958 purchase of a Pontiac with the then-new comfort of Air Drive. Compared to even long-distance thinkers like Jobs, this is patience and vision on a millennial scale. He may be 81 years old, but Amar Bose clearly isn’t done with game-changing innovation.

Warp Drive, Mr. Sulu.

Postscript:  A cautionary note – before shoving to be first in line for your company’s newly installed Bose Ride, drivers experiencing lower body discomfort might profit from a recent column by Landline’s Bob Hudgins.
Recently, Hudgins—who now “drives a desk” instead of a 40-ton rig—began suffering a burning sensation between his leg and hip as well as the alarming radiating leg pain associated with sciatica. He consulted his doctor, who, after careful examination, informed him of his condition as gently as possible:  Hudgins was suffering from an infliction common to middle-aged men, Piriformis Syndrome. 
Fortunately, if caught and treated early, Piriformis needn’t result in permanent disability. The usual treatment is regular strolls between chair and water cooler and a switch from (Hudgin’s term) “tighty-whiteys” to boxer shorts. If this complaint sounds similar to your own, Hudgins urges you to check with your doctor. And maybe also your local Target.

This story was drawn from articles in Transport Topics, FleetOwner, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the website DVice.com, Bose Inc.’s official site, Bose.com and Landline

Advance Business Capital