Knorr-Bremse has completed the renaming of its subsidiary tedrive Steering Systems GmbH. The Knorr-Bremse Group’s Center of Competence for Steering, based in Wülfrath, Germany, is now officially called Knorr-Bremse SteeringSystems GmbH.
With the acquisition of tedrive Steering in 2016, Knorr-Bremse acquired extensive expertise in the engineering, application, testing, production and assembly of steering systems and its components for truck platforms, high volume passenger cars and high performance applications. “In the context of our future product roadmap we’ve been able to identify a wide range of synergy effects at the interface between braking and steering systems and we will be gradually leveraging these synergies. As we move towards highly-automated driving, it is very important to take a holistic view of braking and steering as a connected system,” explains Dr. Peter Laier, Member of the Executive Board of Knorr-Bremse AG, responsible for the Commercial Vehicle Systems division.
The product synergies between Knorr-Bremse’s core competency of braking and its newly acquired expertise in steering systems lays the foundations to take the complex driving functionalities of driver assistance systems and automated driving to the next level. KnorrBremse is thus currently the only supplier capable of actively influencing both longitudinal and lateral vehicle dynamics, in order to keep the truck in its lane automatically, for example, or steer it past a hazard even in extreme situations in terms of dynamic handling.
As a full-line supplier of steering systems with expertise in rack-and-pinion and recirculating ball steering gear systems, Knorr-Bremse SteeringSystems has a firm command of steering engineering and manufacturing across all vehicle segments and axle loads. Applications are found in light commercial vehicles, buses and heavy-duty trucks, as well as special purpose vehicles, SUVs and passenger cars, all the way to motor sport where Knorr-Bremse SteeringSystems equips almost all the competitors in the FIA European Truck Racing Championship. Going forward, the company’s iHSA® (intelligent Hydraulic Steering Assist) technology has a decisive part to play – a hydraulic steering system with electronic actuation specially developed to meet the demands of automated driving in commercial vehicles.
“In an efficiently organized integration phase of less than twelve months, we have been able to integrate the product portfolio and operational processes of tedrive rapidly and smoothly into the development, production and sales procedures at Knorr-Bremse. The next few weeks will see the migration of the company’s IT infrastructure and internet presence, as well,” said Bernd Spies, Chairman of the Management Board of Knorr-Bremse Systeme für Nutzfahrzeuge GmbH and Managing Director of Knorr-Bremse SteeringSystems.