In 2022, Knorr Bremse acquired a controlling interest in the Spanish company, Cojali, which has developed the world leading multi-brand remote diagnostics system, Jaltest, a diagnostic solution specifically for the aftermarket.. The Jaltest system is already available here in Australia.

However, now, unlike on a truck where Knorr Bremse never really needed to provide any kind of diagnostics tool for the OEMs, the company has to provide that for the trailer systems. The trailer manufacturers are too small to work on their own solutions and an operation like Knorr Bremse can only sell an EBS into the market if it has a complete infrastructure in place.

“In the future, with our next generation trailer EBS, we will step away from the offline configuration where you have just a diagnostics program installed on your PC and with a pin code to get a certain level of access and the right to set error messages,” says Stefan Pahl, Director Application Engineering and Technical Sales Knorr Bremse. “Instead, we will change over to an online configuration system, so that we have much better control over what is going on and what has been set up which vehicle, to which ECU.”

Knorr Bremse will be able to keep track of all changes remotely when the vehicles are out in the field, and the workshop will need to authenticate themselves to work with that platform. This will be Knorr Bremse laying a foundation to fulfil the requirements of UNECE regulations 155 and 156 on cyber security and software.

These new European based regulations will make their way to Australia over time, 155 and 156 are not mandated for trailers, yet. The rules around cybersecurity and software will be included in general safety regulations going forward and any future updates will need to meet the minimum requirements coming into place and Knorr Bremse are developing the online configuration platform set up to ensure the systems comply.