Innovative vehicles designed to Australian performance-based standards

The introduction of performance-based standards (PBS) to Australian heavy vehicle regulation has initiated the design of a wide variety of innovative vehicles in many industries. Some examples of these innovations are presented, highlighting the reasons they were developed and the ways in which they were designed to comply with PBS. Although PBS is intended to improve safety and reduce impact on infrastructure, it still offers the scope to simultaneously achieve enormous productivity benefits. Consequently, most of the energy currently being put into PBS vehicle development is coming from road transport contractors seeking improved operational efficiency. A shift towards more intermodal transport in Australia has brought about the need for viable road transport solutions for some of the larger and heavier containers often transported exclusively by rail and super-freight road vehicles. Examples of PBS road vehicle designs accommodating these longer and heavier containers are presented. One of the observed side-effects of PBS is to allow more flexibility in road transport logistics. Modular trailer designs can now be more effectively developed to operate as large inter-city transports that can easily be dismantled into small distribution units in metropolitan areas.