Mark IV to develop hybrid truck tag

By Staff -- Logistics Management, 6/1/2000

Mark IV Industries Inc. of Amherst, N.Y., announced last month that it would develop a new transponder that could be used for electronic toll collection as well as for monitoring commercial vehicles. Transponders, which consist of an antenna and a microcircuit for data storage, transmit information to a roadside reader as a vehicle travels down the highway.

Right now, trucks with a good safety record and a system-specified transponder can bypass weigh stations in a number of states. But because three different systems for weigh-station bypass are in use around the country, interstate truckers currently must carry more than one tag. To simplify operations, the federal government has been pushing for a single standard for all transponders used for motor carrier preclearance.

At the same time, the trucking industry is pushing for a tag that not only could be used in all weigh-station preclearance systems, but would also accommodate electronic toll collection in the various systems used around the country. The proposed Mark IV unit would handle this task as well. "You could have a single transponder on a nationwide carrier's truck, paying tolls in the major systems on the East and West coasts and bypassing the [weigh] stations in between," says Paul Manuel, Mark IV's vice president of sales and marketing.

Mark IV says it expects its new multiple-protocol tag to be ready by the year 2001. "We decided to take the bull by the horns and deliver the supertag that the agencies are looking for," Manuel says.