At Peterbilt, the concept of becoming immersed in our customer’s business is nothing new. In fact, it has long been a cornerstone for new product development.
However, we took this process a step further by creating the Peterbilt Empathy Training Experience — PETE, for short. As the name implies, it is designed to engage our engineers in the real-life experiences of end users, which means spending nights in a truck stop soliciting candid input from drivers. This immersive feedback results in a largely customer-authored “Book of Wishes” that would ultimately result in the Model 579 UltraLoft, the newest addition to the successful on-highway line.
This innovative new product is a direct response to market demands for distinctive styling and fuel-saving aerodynamics on the outside, and a spacious sleeper, suited for team applications, on the inside. I invite you to become immersed in the UltraLoft story (page 12), where you’ll learn about not only its features and benefits, but the compelling process that resulted in its design.
In short, we listened to our customers, and saw for ourselves. The result is a product that, down to the smallest details, is designed to deliver customer and driver satisfaction and achieve standards befitting the Peterbilt brand.
At Peterbilt, we believe that in addition to hearing the voice of our customer, we need to understand the world of our customer. Purposefully, this was the way founder Al Peterman went into the forests of the Pacific Northwest to understand the features necessary to create an innovative, durable logging truck in 1939. And it’s that way today, as we introduce a product that truly has been shaped by customer input.
