Conferences
EGSA Fall 2026 Conference: Powering Data Centers
Sep 21, 20265 min read
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TodayPolicy, regulation, engines, emission norms and clean-fuel intelligence for decision makers.
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SAE COMVEC 2026 brought together the on-highway, off-highway and defense engineering communities under the theme “Resolving Current Challenges While Reimagining the Future.” Keynotes, executive and technical panels with about 90 companies, and an exhibition of 51 companies, examined how the industry can deliver uptime and lower cost of ownership while navigating regulatory uncertainty, new energy options, software-defined architectures, AI and automation.
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• Uptime and total cost of ownership (TCO) were the dominant measures of value: fleets buy operational results, not technology roadmaps.
• No single powertrain is expected to win in the near term. High-efficiency diesel with biofuels remains the long-haul benchmark, battery-electric trucks are gaining in return-to-base duty, and mission-sized hybrids and regional alternative fuels fill other niches.
• The industry is seeking regulatory stability and relief from energy-price volatility; moving beyond tailpipe-only standards was seen as one pathway to pragmatic rules.
• Software-defined, connected vehicles are moving from concept to delivery, but system integration, cybersecurity and data ownership remain the hard problems.
• AI and simulation are compressing engineering, calibration and diagnostic cycles, with governance, traceability and human accountability treated as prerequisites.
• Automation is advancing first in confined, repeatable operations such as yards, corridors and off-road sites; fully unconstrained (Level 5) autonomy is still several years away.
Unplanned downtime was cited at about 8.7 days per truck per year, costing roughly $448–760 per truck per day. Connecting a vehicle turns it into a service, shifting responsibility for availability and repair coordination toward manufacturers and dealers. Diagnostics is evolving from fault codes toward remote, service-oriented health management and prediction of remaining useful life. Prognostics success is measured by avoided disruption rather than alert volume: customers seek around 90 days of warning, which must be balanced against false positives, since trust depends on accuracy. Value is realized when parts, bays and technicians are ready before the vehicle arrives.
Powertrain strategy is being shaped by the 2027 US NOx standard, a broader reset in US regulation and added flexibility in EU heavy-duty CO2 rules. Diesel is expected to remain the best solution for many applications. Battery-electric trucks are advancing in return-to-base duty and are forecast to become the lowest-cost option there by 2035, while long haul awaits charging networks and grid capacity. Hybrids work best when sized to the mission, saving about 50% of fuel in urban transit and up to 78% in airport firefighting vehicles, but only a few percent in long haul. Alternative fuels, which supplied 8.7% of the energy used by US Class 3–8 vehicles and construction and farm equipment in 2023, follow regional resources and policy, such as methanol in India, propane in the US and ethanol in Brazil. Panelists asked for stable, technology-neutral, lifecycle-based rules. They also flagged two concerns: US aftertreatment designs now diverge from global ones, and rare-earth magnet supply is concentrated.
Commercial vehicles face constraints unlike passenger cars: long service lives, many configurations and low volumes. The first wave of software-defined vehicles was described as a failure of industrialization rather than vision, with software linked to more than 40% of recalls. AI is being applied from requirements and documentation to root-cause analysis and calibration. It changes how fast work is done, not who is accountable. Engineering-grade results depend on governed company data, digital threads and human review. Combining AI with physics-based solvers was presented as a major accelerator, with surrogate models reported up to a thousand times faster. New entrants bringing products to market in about two years, compared with a traditional four, are pushing incumbents toward virtual-first development.
As functions spread across control units, suppliers and off-vehicle systems, safety assurance is shifting from components to the complete solution. Passenger-car occupant protection and consumer-style ratings are being extended to trucks, vans and buses. Modular design was discussed as a way to deliver customization through stable, standardized interfaces. Trailers are becoming actively steered, braked and powered elements. In full-scale tests, active steering cut off-tracking by roughly 80–90%, but common test cycles and fault-mode testing are missing. Legacy trailer networks predate cybersecurity, and trailers serve for 15–30 years, which is making trailer security an emerging priority.
Automation is moving from pilots to scaled deployment in highway trucking, middle-mile delivery, logistics yards and off-road robotics. Commercial viability requires validated safety cases for each operating domain, redundancy, service infrastructure and consistent regulation, not just driverless capability. Safe fallback behavior depends on the application: stopping is safe for a slow off-road robot but hazardous on a highway. Across sessions, speakers stressed keeping the human at the center. That means delivering data in context, retaining tactile controls for time-critical functions and building multidisciplinary engineering skills. Public trust was identified as the overriding priority.
Keynote speakers from agriculture and trucking described a shift from optimizing individual machines to connected, intelligent systems in which trucks learn to see, talk and think while users experience simplicity. Open partnerships were seen as essential, and data sharing between manufacturers was expected to develop gradually over five to ten years.
This free edition captures the headlines only. The MobilityNotes members’ report covers every session in depth, including detailed summaries of all keynote and technical sessions with key figures, charts and key takeaways by theme.
