In the commercial vehicle industry, connectors between towing vehicles and trailers must perform flawlessly under demanding circumstances: In the tough daily use, they have to reliably transfer electrical signals and data streams from truck to trailer and back to enable safety-related functionalities like lighting and braking throughout all involved vehicles.
Within this application, the requirements for the connector components like plugs, sockets and cables keep increasing: On 5 January, 2020, the new General Safety Regulation came into effect. This EU Regulation intends to introduce new vehicle safety systems for heavy-duty vehicles thus significantly improving the safety for all participants in road traffic. Of course, these new systems make new demands on the interface between tractor and trailer.
This white paper explores to what extent the existing trailer connectors are suitable to meet the demands of the vehicle safety systems and what it takes to comply with the requirements.
