Work the Body

Walk around an auto plant and you’ll see robot arms flailing and sparks flying as various pieces of metal come together to give shape to a car. Inside a heavy-truck assembly plant it’s a very different atmosphere. Teams of real people build each vehicle by hand as it moves down the line.

Yet even when a truck leaves the plant it may not be ready for delivery to the customer. It’s often passed along to an “upfitter” who installs the custom components many original equipment manufacturers won’t touch: special production options like bodies, axles, extended cabs, and specialized accessories. Upfitters do most of their work with medium-duty straight trucks. Presented with little more than a cab and frame rails, they add whatever is necessary to finish the vehicle and prep it for service. You have at least two parties working to create the final product, plus the dealer who helped spec the truck in the first place.

In Canada, at least, this method of assembly leaves doubt about who is ultimately responsible for making sure a new truck meets motor vehicle safety standards at the time it’s ready to be licensed.

It’s an issue most vehicle owners know little about, says Al Tucker, general manager of the Canadian Transportation Equipment Association. The CTEA, based in St. Thomas, Ont., represents manufacturers of truck and trailer equipment in Canada.

“The problem doesn’t raise its head for the vehicle owner until he finds himself on the pointy end of some sharp questions by enforcement people,” Tucker says. If you spec’d a special accessory that’s actuated by air, for example, and the installer has to add an air tank and move air lines around to accommodate it, who’s to say how that modification affected the air brakes?

“If you ask a body shop or a dealer to make major alterations and it somehow throws a safety-certified system out of compliance, right now there is no obligation for the installer to bring the vehicle back into compliance and re-certify it,” Tucker notes. “The last thing a vehicle owner want to find out is that the vehicle is not certified at the time he goes to license it. Unfortunately, it happens.”

NEW RULES

In January, Transport Canada published new Canada Motor Vehicle Safety Standards requiring manufacturers to document their work on a truck or trailer and make them legally responsible for the modifications they make. The regulations affect “incomplete-vehicle” manufacturers (the original equipment manufacturer), “intermediate” manufacturers, and “final-stage” manufacturers who build, alter, or finish a new truck chassis or trailer in Canada.

Starting Jan. 31, 2003, manufacturers of incomplete vehicles will be required to apply a label that says who built the vehicle, where and when it was made, and affirms that it complies with all CMVSS standards.

Furthermore, the incomplete-vehicle manufacturer must provide direction to any intermediate manufacturer as to what can and can’t be modified. If the intermediate manufacturer alters the vehicle, it too must place a label next to the original, providing the company name, date, modifications applied, and a statement that the vehicle conforms to both the OEM requirements and those of the CMVSS.

The final-stage manufacturer must then add to the vehicle document its name and mailing address, plus a clear and precise description of all the changes it made to the incomplete vehicle. The final-stage manufacturer will have to retain and provide provincial licensing officials with all the vehicle documentation for at least five years after the date the vehicle was finally completed.

This may seem like a hassle, but for the vehicle owner, the payoff can be tangible, Tucker says. “I was talking to someone in British Columbia who said vehicle inspectors have taken to opening doors and looking at labels on the door posts. Say the inspector weighs the vehicle and sees 19,000 pounds on a front axle that the door-post label says is rated to 14,000 pounds. The vehicle operator says he had the front axle converted to a 20,000-pound rating when he bought the truck. The inspector wants to know why the truck doesn’t have the right label. It’s a fair question. How would he know the vehicle was modified?”

CHALLENGES

With the rules coming into force next January, federal regulators face two challenges in the months ahead: they have to identify and reach scores of small-volume body shops, heavy equipment dealers, and manufacturers to let them know about the new standards, and they have to figure out a strategy to enforce the rules.

Choosing a final-stage manufacturer at random, I called Dependable Truck & Tank, in Brampton, Ont., to ask their opinion about having to warehouse this vehicle documentation for five years. After several calls, the receptionist told me they “weren’t interested” in the topic.

Tucker says he’s not surprised to hear that manufacturers aren’t aware of the new standards, despite the best efforts of the CTEA and Transport Canada.

“It’s amazing, the number of people who are engaged in this business,” he says. “Most are professionals, and they do a good job. They’re just ignorant of the rules.

“But if there’s an accident and the frame breaks, the government is going to want to know why, and it’s going to ask the chassis manufacturer, because it’s the chassis manufacturer’s safety mark on the vehicle,” he says. “There may have been two or three parties who worked on the vehicle before it was delivered, and who may have compromised the frame. But again, how is the investigator to know? At this point he might simply ask how many of these chassis were made and order a recall for all of them. Nobody wants that. Not the chassis manufacturer. Not the vehicle owner. Nobody.”