REAL-WORLD TESTING THE INTERNATIONAL® S13 INTEGRATED POWERTRAIN

What our team does is craft real-world testing experiences for our engineers and the International Truck leadership team. Most of the time it’s at our proving grounds in Indiana, or one of our test sites in Las Vegas, Denver or Fairbanks. A couple of times a year we’ll go out on the road and do a larger trip. In 2023, we coordinated a Summer test from Las Vegas to Denver, Colorado to experience the temperatures, the altitudes, the grades and compare our S13 Integrated Powertrain to other competitor products. Last week we did a winter test that went from Minneapolis through Iowa to Illinois, and eventually to our proving grounds in Indiana. This gave our research and development and engineering teams an exact understanding of what it’s like for our customers in a real-world environment.

The majority of the testing and validation we do in research and development is per plan. It's ‘here's the objective, here's the standard, here's the metric, here’s the prescribed route.’ This was very unscripted. We didn't know what construction we were going to run into, what route deviations, congestion, or weather. So, it really gave us a true real-world customer experience.

Everybody’s trying to do the same thing: get goods from point A to point B. However, everybody goes about it in a slightly different way. Each of the tractor trailers was loaded to a combined weight of 65,000 to 70,000 pounds which really helped us notice all the nuances with powertrain performance, ride and handling, steering input, driver comfort, and how the vehicle handles with the load in equal scenarios. What we learned is the S13 Integrated Powertrain is performing really well. I think all of us walked away feeling that we’ve really got something here.