Two ARTSA Reports Highlight PBS Approved Heavy Vehicles

Recorded on May 15th, 2019

Media Release

The National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR), Transport Certification Australia (TCA) and the Australian Road Transport Suppliers Association (ARTSA) have demonstrated the success of Australia’s world-leading PBS scheme through two new reports.

The first report titled Performance Based Standards – Australia’s PBS Fleet released today, highlights that:

• One in five relevant new heavy vehicles manufactured in 2018 were PBS approved, up from one in six in 2017
• 1900 new approvals for new PBS combinations in 2018, an increase from around 1400 in 2017
• In the last five years total new PBS combination approvals have doubled, while the heavy vehicle market has only grown by 20 per cent over the same period
• More than 55 per cent of PBS approvals are for truck and dog combinations
• PBS approved prime mover and trailer combinations have doubled in the last five years

ARTSA Chair Martin Toomey said the PBS scheme was encouraging heavy vehicle renewal nationwide. “One of the key benefits of the PBS scheme has been to accelerate the renewal of the heavy vehicle fleet nationwide. The median age of PBS vehicles is four years compared to 12 years for the entire heavy vehicle fleet,” Mr Toomey said.

The second report titled Performance Based Standards – Freight Task Analysis, provides insights into the movements of heavy vehicles certified under the Performance Based Standards (PBS) scheme, using telematics data collected from the TCA’s Intelligent Access Program (IAP) across Australia.

Rob Perkins, Executive Director, ARTSA Data said “the report contains aggregated statistics from registered PBS freight vehicles enrolled in the IAP derived from global positioning system (GPS) records collected from vehicles during 2018. It provides a bird’s-eye view of the movements of a sample of the PBS fleet”.

The report demonstrated that:

• Newer vehicles travelled further per journey and performed more journeys, compared to older vehicles.
• PBS freight vehicles perform a broad mix of freight tasks, with an average journey distance of 158km.

ARTSA collaborates with organisations including the NHVR and TCA to produce informative documents such as this publication, but also provides a commercial service for industry wanting to access more detailed heavy vehicle data. To find out more about ARTSA Data and its collections contact ARTSA Data Executive Director Rob Perkins on rob@artsa.com.au

The reports can be downloaded by visiting www.artsa.com.au