Phillips Connect Puts Trailer Health on the Trailer's Nose

Tires and lights accounted for nearly a third of all vehicle out-of-service violations in the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance's 2026 International Roadcheck — and Phillips Connect has just launched two products aimed squarely at that number.

The company rolled out the pair Sunday at the American Trucking Associations' Management Conference & Exhibition in Charlotte, North Carolina. Insights, a diagnostics layer for trailer sensor data, now names the faulty lighting circuit and flags slow tire leaks. TrailerSignal, a nose-mounted lamp, glows green when a trailer is ready to dispatch and amber when it isn't.

The math behind the launch is blunt. Tires drove 2,914 of the 13,924 vehicle out-of-service violations in this year's Roadcheck — 20.9%, second only to brake systems. Lighting added another 1,659, or 11.9%. Both defect classes count against a carrier's Vehicle Maintenance BASIC under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's Compliance, Safety, Accountability program.

"We help you answer those simple questions: are my lights working or are they at risk of failing?" Mark Wallin, president and general manager of Phillips Connect, told FreightWaves.

What does this change for yard crews?

Federal rules already require drivers to satisfy themselves that a truck's lighting and tires are in working order before driving, and every required lamp must be capable of operating at all times. Enforcement, though, has traditionally depended on eyes in the yard.

Fleets "rely heavily today on a group of people in the yard to detect issues with a trailer's lights," Wallin said. Phillips Connect's sensors were already reporting tire and light health data. The gap was interpretation.

"Knowing that there's something unusual on a circuit was the first step. With Insights, we can tell a fleet which circuit has the problem, what's likely causing it, and what the technician should check," he said.

Insights now distinguishes taillights from running lights from marker lights, separates partial faults from full ones, suggests a likely cause — a burned-out bulb, water in the lamp — and confirms when the fault clears. It also catches the intermittent kind.

"A lamp might have a loose wire or water in a bulb, so it doesn't work when you pick up the trailer in the morning, but as the day heats up the water evaporates and the light works again," Wallin said. "Insights catches that pattern, so the technician knows there's a real problem even when the light looks fine."

Tires: watching what ATIS hides

On the tire side, Insights flags slow leaks and shows which tire is losing air and how fast — even when pressure reads normal or the trailer runs an automatic tire inflation system. It also flags ATIS malfunctions, pressure imbalance between paired tires, and miles driven on underinflated tires.

Wallin estimated that "maybe half" of trailers coming to market now carry ATIS, and he thinks the systems breed false confidence.

"Fleets running ATIS have made a smart investment in keeping their tires inflated. Insights shows them what that system is compensating for, so a slow leak gets fixed in the shop instead of growing into something worse – like a blowout," he said.

Alerts route three ways: to fleet, safety and maintenance teams in the Connect1 platform, urgent tire alerts to drivers through DriverAssist, and diagnostics to technicians through the TechAssist app. Insights can also open service tickets directly in a fleet's maintenance system.

A traffic light that needs no login

TrailerSignal answers the same ready-or-not question for people who never open an app — hostlers, dock crews, yard checkers. "There are a lot of people in the yard who aren't looking at a computer or a device, or this information isn't available in a hostler system, or to your yard check person yet," Wallin said.

The company rates the light readable from 50 feet. A solar panel charges a built-in battery so it works unplugged; it stays lit while parked and shuts off once the trailer moves. Installation takes as little as five minutes, with no wiring.

Fleets choose which signals turn it amber. One customer uses it at the dock, where amber tells a driver the trailer doors are still open. "It can be a very dangerous, high-risk situation if that trailer is pulled away [while] the doors open," Wallin said. The caveat: the light only knows what the trailer's sensors know — door, tire, light, liftgate, brake data from any smart trailer sensor feeds it.

Neither release lists pricing, but both products are available now. The launches follow a March expansion into brake and liftgate data, and Phillips Connect — based in Irvine, California, with Wallin appointed president and GM in May — plans to extend Insights to cargo activity during loading, unloading and transit.

For now, the pitch is simple. "Our mechanic finds the amber tag, pulls up our app, looks at the health of that trailer, and can find a slow leak," Wallin said. "Never could have had access to that kind of trailer data before."