March 24, 2026
It’s been more than a quarter century since suppliers made electronic parking brakes available for passenger vehicles and light trucks. Like other mechatronic systems, EPBs provide benefits unavailable to mechanical designs, including the ability for OEMs to tailor automated applications, adjustments and releases for safety and convenience. EPB auto-apply not only prevents potential vehicle rollaway hazards when drivetrain components fail, it can be programed to automatically apply anytime a driver exits an unsecured vehicle. Now, EPBs in heavy commercial trucks are getting their turn. In 2025, no fewer than five major Class 8 truck brands – Daimler Truck’s Freightliner, PACCAR’s Kenworth and Peterbilt, and Volvo Group’s Volvo and Mack – have announced that their new models are equipped with optional or standard electronic park brakes designed to prevent rollaways. For MY 2024, PACCAR’s European DAF brand unveiled its EPB with smart brake control as standard on the New Generation XF XG XG+ models.
In heavy trucks, EPB switches replaces the standard yellow and red airbrake knob. A review of Daimler Truck/ Freightliner’s fifth generation Cascadia notes: Easily maneuvered toggle switches with LED indicators eliminate the cumbersome push-and-pull of the “ketchup and mustard” pneumatic controls inside the Cascadia cab. Gone too are the loud bang and hiss from setting and releasing the brakes. The electronic park brake system eliminates air lines behind the dash.
And heavy truck EPBs are often integrated with other parking features. Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems, which supplies its Intellipark® Electronic Parking Brake to Freightliner, Kenworth, and Peterbilt is equipped with “advanced safety features,” such as rollaway mitigation, Smart Unpark™ (an automatic release feature), and Auto Trailer Brake Release, according to a Bendix press release.
These features are supported by unique interlocks that verify the vehicle is ready to be parked or unparked through sensors that monitor door position, seat belt status, and vehicle movement.
Like those designed for passenger vehicles, heavy truck EPBs can be configured to activate under different conditions. For example, Volvo’s EPB activates if the driver doors open while the truck is in neutral. Intellipark activates the EPB when the system determines “that the driver does not have control over the vehicle when it is unparked,” the driver door is open, the vehicle speed is low or zero, the accelerator pedal is not pressed, and the foot brake is not applied. Before auto-applying, a visual warning is displayed in the instrument cluster alerting the driver to engage the park brake. If the driver does not intervene, the EPB is automatically applied and the system will illuminate a visual telltale instructing the driver to pull the EBP switch to acknowledge that a rollaway mitigation event has occurred, the horn will honk and an audible alert will sound until the driver does so.
Rollaway prevention is a major selling point of heavy truck EPBs.
An October 2024 trade press story about Daimler Truck’s North America Freightliner Cascadia noted that: “Rollaway prevention is the goal of an all-new electronic park brake that automatically applies the parking brake when a driver leaves the seat or opens the door without setting the brake.”
In June 2025, Volvo Trucks announced that among the “suite of digital and mechanical safety systems” was a “new electronic parking brake, standard on all new VNL and VNR models. The next-generation parking brake engages automatically if the truck is put in neutral and the driver door is opened.”
A December 2025 Mack Trucks video “Using the Electronic Parking Brake on Your Mack® Pioneer” describes its safety benefits:
“When you’re driving a big truck like the Mac Pioneer, control is everything, especially when it comes to stopping and parking. That’s why the Pioneer is equipped with an electronic parking brake or EPB, designed to give you peace of mind every time you park your truck… But here’s where the electronic parking brake takes things further. The EPB will automatically engage when the vehicle is at a standstill and the ignition is turned off or the driver or passenger door is open.”
Marketing for commercial truck EPBs’ rollaway mitigation features, manufacturers specifically note that they were designed to prevent a safety hazard resulting from human error.
In a June 2025 Commercial Carrier Journal story Dan Zula, Bendix’s brake control product group director, describes how the introduction of software allows the vehicle to support the driver by monitoring “whether or not the human has forgotten to do something.”
“Where we had safety-critical risks before – maybe the driver forgetting to release the spring brakes before pulling away, and they could have an incident where the wheels got packed because they drove through it, or they forgot to apply the park brake when exiting the vehicle – we now have software involved monitoring a bunch of inputs, a bunch of conditions on the vehicle, and setting the park brake or releasing the park brake on behalf of the driver as a safety mechanism for a higher level of safety,” he added.
Kenworth’s Dec. 2025 announcement that it was offering an optional Bendix® Intellipark® EPB system for its heavy- and medium-duty models said:
“The Electronic Parking Brake system brings a new level of redundancy, simplicity, and assurance to our customers,” said Kevin Haygood, Kenworth’s assistant general manager for sales and marketing. “With EPB, drivers can count on an added layer of protection that helps to mitigate rollaway incidents. While this technology is beneficial for any customer, it’s particularly useful in vocational, P&D, and other applications that require drivers to enter and exit the cab numerous times per day.”
Similarly, Lisa McKenzie, highway product marketing manager at Freightliner, mentions that the driver may forget to set the parking brake due to fatigue. “We also have rollaway mitigation, which is huge,” McKenzie said. “Now, if your driver had a long day and forgets to set the park brake, the truck is now going to set it for the driver using a seat occupancy sensor.”
EPBs with rollaway mitigation is standard on DAF XF XG XG+, Freightliner Cascadia, and Volvo VNL and VNR models and available as a factory-installed option on Peterbilt and Kenworth Class 8 and medium duty models. It is hard to say how quickly Class 8 truck buyers will add EPBs when optional. Bendix’s Intellipark was first available for order or retrofit in 2019, and at the time, Rebecca Carter, Bendix product manager for specialty valves, was quoted in a trade journal article that the company “was already receiving ‘overwhelming interest’ in the technology.”
Supplier TRW (now ZF) debuted EPBs with automated features for passenger vehicles in 2001, marketing them as the more economical choice for interior space and per-unit cost. At the same time, TRW emphasized that EPBs were configurable to include significant passive safety benefits via an auto-application when the vehicle transmission was in a non-Park gear and the driver opens the door to exit. Yet adoption of EPBs through the U.S. fleet was slow.
Even fewer manufacturers took advantage of the auto-apply option to mitigate rollaway anytime the driver attempted to exit an unsecured vehicle. More commonly auto-apply has been used in concert with functions such as Brake Hold, a convenience feature that allows the driver to remove their foot from the brake pedal while maintaining hydraulic brake pressure to keep the vehicle temporarily stationary, such as at a traffic light, or until the driver depresses the accelerator. Many OEMs designed their Brake Hold systems to automatically apply the EPB if the driver unlatched the seatbelt and opened the door while in Brake Hold – in recognition that the driver can lose awareness of the engine and transmission status when the vehicle is stationary, the engine is on, and the transmission is not in Park.
But few manufacturers have designed an automatic application of the EPB to prevent vehicle rollaway anytime the driver attempts to exit an unsecured vehicle. In calendar year 2013, Fiat Chrysler Automotive was the first automaker to implement a robust EPB-based automatic anti-rollway feature, Safehold. First installed on the MY 2014 Jeep Cherokee, Safehold automatically activates the EPB if the transmission is not in Park while the ignition switch is in Run and includes a manual deactivation feature. Similarly, the Bendix system activates the EPB when the vehicle is stationary, driver’s seatbelt unlatched, no inputs to the brake or accelerator, and driver’s door open.
Thirteen years after FCA implemented Safehold many passenger vehicle OEMs still use EPB auto-apply in discrete, narrowly defined scenarios that often don’t include driver exiting with the gear selector not in Park.
According to NHTSA’s latest estimates, in 2021, 210 non-occupants died and 1,435 were injured in rollaway incidents.
That EPBs with rollaway mitigation come standard in several Class 8 truck manufacturers’ models is a good sign that the commercial carrier industry recognizes that even professional drivers – tired or distracted – can make mistakes like any other driver, and that EPBs with automatic applications can prevent them from becoming costly and deadly.