Since truck drivers spend eight hours a day (or more if they’re fudging on HOS rules) behind the wheel, tricking out one’s cab is often a high art in the trucking transport business. Some of the accessories market to truckers save money (like air-conditioning systems that allow trucks to shut the engines down) while others just provide comfort. However, some can do both.
Bose, the high-end acoustics maker, is getting into the trucking business with a vibration-absorbing chair, which takes some of the technology that goes into speakers and cancels out the vibrations from the road, keeping the head and torso level as the truck goes down the road. Since Bose’s day job is to make speakers vibrate just right, it isn’t a big jump to getting things not to vibrate.
Spending $2000 or more on a chair seems obsessive, but if it a chair to keep the trucker from vibrating like he’s on an old quarter-fed hotel bed, it can be money well spent in keeping a trucker from getting fatigue and back issues courtesy of a bumpy ride. If a $3000 investment saves $10,000 in medical and worker’s-comp claims over the life of the chair, it would be money well spent. You’d also likely get added alertness from drivers, which would be a benefit to freight carriers as well, albeit one that would be hard to quantify in the short term.
The exact price point that the Bose chair comes in at may dictate the amount of market share it gets. A pricier chair might be seen as a “reasonable accommodation” under the ADA for a driver with a bad back, but might not be made standard in trucks, while a price closer to the $2000 for air-ride chairs might put Bose in as a serious player in the market.
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01/28/bos…-at-auto-seats/