Electronic Gadgets.

Just sitting here thinking about all the nanny and safety electronic gadgets on modern vehicles related to trucks.

Most trucks are purchased for the ability to haul or pull a load. But there is nothing installed on the truck to indicate how much load or how much is being pulled.

I would think the technology exists to install load cells on all body and box mounts. Pipe the signals into an ECU, combine, display on the dashboard. Shoot, could even go a step or two further to adjust the behavior of the truck. Fuel management, gear management, braking management.......

Now, getting an interface to a trailer is bigger problem because of the plethora of trailers that can be hooked onto a truck. About the only thing consistent would be the hitch. Load cells could be set up to measure the Tongue weight and hitch pull, then feed this into the ECU, dashboard.......

IMHO, this data would be more useful than the adaptive cruise control or lane sense.

 

Agreed. Load Moment Indicators are pretty common as a feature on the telehandlers. Now that I think about it, it is sort of strange that nobody's thought to add one.

Honestly, I think it is a "value added" consideration. Would people be willing to suffer the added engineering cost added to the MSRP to add that feature to the product.

 

A hitch pin with a strain gauge might be interesting. You’d have to do some math though to calculate the mass from all the dynamic loads.